South Africa made it to their first men’s World Cup final but they are not celebrating yet
Sidharth Monga27-Jun-20243:20
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A big indicator of the scars South Africa’s men’s cricket teams carry is how the outpouring of emotion at making their first World Cup final came more from former cricketers who faced all those near-misses than the ones who have made it to the final. Perhaps it is because they have a final on hand in two days’ time. Perhaps it is because they are led by a fairly even-headed captain. Perhaps it is because they finally got an easy win, which can sometimes rob the moment of its enormity.Whatever it is, their media commitments after the semi-final didn’t suggest a team relieved at having crossed a hurdle they had fallen at seven times previously. Their mental strength has been called into question. The tag “choker” has been thrown around liberally. This is only their second win in a knockout match at a World Cup. Yet they hardly displayed any emotion.At least winning close games this time must make them feel something is different, right? “I don’t really look too much into things like that, to be honest,” Markram said. “It’s a game of cricket. Someone has to win, and someone has to lose ultimately. That’s the name of the game. You take it in your stride. You do get belief, though, from winning close games and potentially winning games that you thought you weren’t going to win. It does a lot for your changing room and the vibe in the changing room. We’ll take a little bit of confidence from that and see if we can put it to any use in the final.”Related
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That Markram is focused more on the cricket and not on the signs is evident from how he didn’t even know he has won every World Cup match – as a boy at the Under-19 World Cup and as a man in ODIs and T20Is – as a captain.Tabraiz Shamsi, though, gave a slightly better insight into what it might mean for some of them to make it to the final. Dale Steyn, a commentator at the ground, tweeted how emotional he was. He also met Shamsi on the sidelines. “I actually did speak to him after the game,” Shamsi said. “He gave me a massive hug and said the exact same thing that, like I said to you, this is not just for us, it’s for the people back home and the players that have played before us. They have laid the foundation for the team to progress and it’s just our duty to take it one step forward.”Are they deliberately playing it down because they might fear getting too emotional too soon? “There’s no such thing, as you would’ve seen throughout the whole campaign from this team,” Shamsi said. “We haven’t even worried about the second fixture that was ahead of us. It was just about the next game and the next and the next. So now we’ve got to the final, we can sit down, see who we are going to be facing and then do our preparation as we have done for every single team.”