India vs South Africa (AP Photo/Ajit Solanki)

NEW DELHI: South Africa hammered India by 76 runs in their opening Super 8 match of the T20 World Cup, handing the hosts a reality check and exposing serious flaws in their batting at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad on Sunday. Chasing 188, India collapsed to 111 in 18.5 overs on a tricky surface, with the Proteas bowlers dominating throughout. Marco Jansen, Keshav Maharaj and Corbin Bosch led a collective bowling effort, while Jasprit Bumrah’s brilliant spell earlier in the game went in vain. For South Africa, David Miller, Dewald Brevis and Tristan Stubbs played crucial roles in lifting the total to 187/7 after an early wobble.

After the match, South Africa captain Aiden Markram praised his team for reading the conditions well and executing their plans. “Great performance. Very different type of wicket to what we’ve had here, so great to see the boys assess that pretty early and adapt their skills to execute their plans,” he said at the post-match presentation. Markram highlighted the importance of the Miller-Brevis partnership, adding, “I think first and foremost was the partnership. (Miller and Brevis) The guys were great, put that together for us, steadied the ship and kept us in the game.”He explained how the team adjusted its approach in the latter half of the innings, noting, “so it was about finding space where we could run hard, drop the ego and take as much as we could at the back end.” Markram also praised his bowling group, calling their performance a big boost after a slow start to the tournament. “We’re going to make mistakes, we don’t mind that as a group, so we’ll brush those aside. We feel like Lungi is a threat whenever he bowls and that he can take wickets for us in that middle phase. It depends on conditions,” he added.Looking ahead, he warned against complacency, describing West Indies as “a dangerous T20 side” and stressing the need to stay sharp for the upcoming clash.India, meanwhile, endured a disastrous batting display. Early wickets put them on the back foot, and none of the top-order batters managed to build a meaningful innings on a surface where the ball gripped, and timing was difficult. Even Suryakumar Yadav struggled to find fluency, while the middle order could not recover from the early collapse. Hardik Pandya and Shivam Dube tried to rebuild, but South Africa’s disciplined bowling plans shut down any late fightback.

Shivam Dube, left, captain Suryakumar Yadav and Hardik Pandya (AP Photo)

AHMEDABAD: The T20 World Cup has entered the Super 8 stage. The tournament, designed to soothe commercial nerves by pre-seeding teams, has lost some of its organic charm along the way. The finalists from the last edition, India and South Africa, have reached Ahmedabad for a fresh bout. Unlike second rounds of World Cups in other sports, they have had the luxury of planning for this day, at this venue, since the ICC released the fixtures in late Nov. All they had to do was avoid an upset against Associate and lower-ranked teams in the first fortnight of the tournament. Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!Now that both sides have had at least one scare in the group stage, they will turn up on Sunday evening in front of a packed crowd with little room for excuses and an unforgiving weight of expectations. The tournament is in its ‘no let-up zone’. “If I am in that situation (to decide tournament fixtures), I will definitely try and tweak it,” was India captain Suryakumar Yadav’s honest confession on the teams being pre-seeded. The financial scars from the ODI World Cups in 2003 and 2007 still haunt the caretakers of the sport. In trying to guard against that, the format has reduced the element of surprise in a global event.

The familiarity factor Familiarity with conditions and opponents will be the last of the concerns in either camp, having played each other India barely a couple of months ago. South Africa, for instance, come into this match having already played three matches at this venue with another to go after Sunday. “I think almost all the players have played N number of games in Ahmedabad. Even the Indian team has played a lot of games here. It’s going to be a good 50-50 competition,” Surya stated on match eve. But he was also prompt to mention that the overseas players’ exposure to franchise has anyway negated that home advantage to a great extent. “We know what teams we are playing. And we also had a good number of days in between previous games. So, we got good time to prepare for every team,” Surya highlighted the benefits of being pre-seeded. South Africa wicketkeeper Quinton de Kock suggested this familiarity could be a double-edged sword. “That’s what’s going to make for quite a good game tomorrow because we’ve played against each other quite a bit over the last two months. And to be honest the teams haven’t really changed much. We’ve played against each other a lot in the IPL. So, it’s just a matter of being out there, who crumbles under pressure first,” De Kock claimed.Treading cautiously Surya, since the beginning of the campaign, has never denied the pressure of playing a World Cup at home, let alone defending the title. For once, since becoming India’s T20I captain, he eschewed his characteristic quips in media briefings on Saturday evening. “I never said we don’t have any fear. I only said that we are not worried about anything,” he firmly corrected the media. He didn’t deny whispers about the law of averages catching up with India’s rampaging run in ICC white-ball tournaments in the last two years. Neither did he downplay the fact that the collapse against USA at the top of the tournament had shaken the core strategy of the team. That jailbreak in Mumbai grounded Surya’s high-flying bunch of T20 hitmen. “Since that USA game, we have not been thinking too much about how we plan to start our Super 8 campaign. We started thinking more about the next day, taking one step at a time. There will be pressure. If there is no pressure, there won’t be any fun in playing this game,” Surya stated. The black soil pitch South Africa deflated Indian cricket’s ego, sweeping the two-Test series in India in Nov. They bare open India’s fragility against the turning ball, which has interestingly continued to dominate discussions even during this World Cup. De Kock was blunt in mentioning that he has seen no turn at this venue in the three previous games. On Sunday, the curators will roll out the 22-yard surface made of black soil. The red-soil pitches have stayed under the lush green layer of grass. TOI understands that the team had identified that playing on a red-soil pitch, which usually offers better bounce than a black-soil pitch, in the second Test in Guwahati worked in favour of the South Africans. The murmurs suggested that the SENA teams are much more comfortable with greater bounce even if the pitch took turn or played slow. The Indian team has practiced on black soil pitches at the centre square here for two days. Surya has entered the most crucial week of his captaincy career. The preparations could not have been any better. Now, as De Kock said, it’s down to who blinks first!

AHMEDABAD: In the last week of Feb in 2021, Axar Patel’s international career truly got rolling here at the revamped Narendra Modi stadium when he played the lead role in demolishing England in the Test series. The three preceding years out of the Indian team had already transformed him as a cricketer. Five years later, he will be stepping on to his home turf as a core member of the leadership group when the T20 World Cup enters its business end with India taking on South Africa on Sunday. Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!In a chat with TOI in Jan, Axar claimed those three years out of the Indian team helped him identify the areas to work on to be a better person and understand what he needed to become a better cricketer.

Axar’s carefree and funny-to-the-bone on-screen demeanour, often ending up as memes, gains more traction on social media. He likes to keep everything around him as uncomplicated as possible. That said, for all the riches he has earned through cricket, he prefers building a new swanky house in his hometown in Nadiad which is around 60 km from Ahmedabad. He rushes to his comfort place in Nadiad when he isn’t with the Indian team. Yet, the process he follows to stay on top as an international cricketer is as rigorous and detailed as any. The extensive training sessions are all scheduled at the GS Patel Stadium in the Kheda district. It’s just that he has formed a safe and strong core team outside Indian cricket. Leading that team is his wife Meha, charting out his diet. “Meha is a qualified dietician. Even if he is travelling with the Indian team, he gets every meal cleared by Meha,” Axar’s childhood friend and confidant Keval Patel in Nadiad told TOI. “He comes gets a longish break from the Indian team maybe a couple of times in a year. He loves to eat cheese vada paav and laze with us when he comes here. Meha doesn’t stop him from eating but adjusts the next few meals accordingly,” Keval mentioned. Much of Axar’s evolution as a cricketer and as a batter in particular happened at the GS Patel stadium. Axar took it on himself to renovate the gym with very basic facilities and turn it into a high-end fitness centre for the youngsters in the region. “He usually follows the routine given to him by the support staff in the BCCI. But he realised that the local kids also need better facilities. Five years ago, he said he will fund the renovation of the gym. The gym has pictures of all the top Indian cricketers mounted on the wall,” said Keval. Soon, Keval talked about Axar’s meticulous cricket training drills. Before joining the Indian team for this T20 World Cup, he had a session with the Delhi Capitals team in Delhi where he trained for batting after the 15th over of the innings. He was probably intimated by the team management he would be needed to bat lower down the order unlike in the preceding assignments. “He plans training sessions according to different batting situations. He bats for four-five hours a day for the last five-six years. On certain days, he will be practicing against the new ball. On other days, he will bat on the centre square, practicing only power-hitting,” Keval revealed. In the chat with TOI, Axar said he regained confidence in his batting after MS Dhoni asked him to think like a regular batter around 2018 and he could work on it with Ricky Ponting’s backing at the Capitals from 2019. And what drills does he do for his bowling? “He just does spot bowling. His only focus is to get his pitching right. He will be hitting the same spot for a long period of time, varying pace and angles,” Keval said. Axar’s utility batting has overshadowed Axar the left-arm spinner in the last year or so made more headlines in the past year. But it’s hard to discount his consistent contributions with the ball after enduring a deluge of barbs from experts for the first half of his international career. In 2021, he had told TOI that he started believing he must be a special bowler to have made it this far without being a conventional left-arm spinner. “I did talk with R Ashwin but he does some really deep thinking. I can’t do that,” Axar had joked. It’s been a long journey for India’s one of the most understated cricketers in the last five years. The next two and a half weeks could propel him to becoming a poster boy of Indian cricket.