Ten Overs, Thirty-Three Runs, Four Wickets: Bjorn Fortuin Ends Namibia's Tour in an Afternoon

There is a version of this tour that Namibian cricket will remember warmly, and it is mostly true. They beat South Africa in a T20I by 18 runs. They played a part in a match that produced 445 runs in forty overs. For a fortnight they looked like a side that had closed a gap most people assumed was unclosable.

Sunday was the other version. Bowled out for 156 in 36.2 overs, beaten by nine wickets with more than twenty-eight overs unused, and a fifty-over series lost 3-0 without ever really threatening to be anything else. The fifty-over format is the format that widens differences rather than hiding them, and over three matches it widened this one considerably.

Bjorn Fortuin's ten overs cost 33 runs and took four wickets. In a fifty-over innings that lasted only 36.2 overs, that means a left-arm spinner bowled more than a quarter of the deliveries Namibia faced and conceded barely a fifth of the runs they scored. Namibia never found a way to attack him and, more damagingly, never found a way to see him off and score elsewhere.

Kwena Maphaka took 2 for 18 from 5.2 overs and finished the innings; Nqaba Peter took 2 for 39. But the shape of the innings belonged to Fortuin. Namibia were 72 for 2 in the twenty-first over — a perfectly respectable platform — and were 125 for 9 by the thirty-fourth. Eight wickets fell for 84 runs.

A Busing-Volschenk's 31 came from 68 balls, which was the innings the situation asked for and also the innings that told you how difficult scoring had become. Zane Green's 33 from 42 was the closest thing Namibia had to counter-attack, and M Heingo's unbeaten 20 from six balls at the end was the sort of cameo that lifts a total from embarrassing to merely insufficient.

South Africa needed 157 and lost one wicket getting them. Jason Hermann made 77 from 59 balls with thirteen fours — an innings almost entirely in boundaries along the ground, which at 1,700 metres above sea level on a quick outfield is the most efficient way to bat. Connor Esterhuizen was more patient and finished 68 not out from 68.

Their opening stand of 150 in 126 balls ended in the twenty-first over with seven still required. Dewald Brevis hit a six from his second ball and that was that. Namibia's four bowlers who were asked to break the stand — Ruben Trumpelmann, JT Brassell, Gerhard Erasmus and Heingo — took nothing between them from 17.3 overs.

Hermann took the Player of the Series award, which across a tour of this length was the correct verdict on a consistent top-order tour rather than a reward for one afternoon.

Windhoek's altitude is usually a batting advantage — the ball travels, the outfield is fast, and totals of 270 and beyond are the norm here. That makes Namibia's 156 harder to explain away and easier to diagnose: this was not a pitch that did unusual things, it was an innings in which a disciplined spinner was allowed to bowl ten overs unchallenged. South Africa's chase, at better than seven an over on a surface where they needed only 3.1, confirmed the surface was not the problem.

We leaned towards South Africa, and we gave the right reason — that fifty overs widen talent differentials in a way twenty overs do not. We named Kwena Maphaka as the South African to watch and he took two wickets; we named Connor Esterhuizen's ability to build an innings and he finished unbeaten on 68.

We got one thing badly wrong, and it is a factual miss rather than a judgement call. We framed this match as a series decider. It was not: South Africa had already won the first two ODIs, by 99 runs on DLS and by 157 runs, and arrived in Windhoek 2-0 up with the series in hand. Our preview also named Jan Frylinck as Namibia's man to watch — he made 2 from 10 balls. Both of those are on us.

South Africa leave Namibia having won the T20I leg and swept the ODIs, with Hermann, Esterhuizen and Brevis all having spent useful time in the middle and Fortuin having reminded selectors that a left-arm spinner who can bowl ten for thirty-three is a scarce commodity.

Namibia's tour should not be judged solely on this afternoon. But the pattern across the three ODIs — 99 runs, 157 runs, nine wickets — is a widening one rather than a narrowing one, and the specific problem is the middle overs with the bat. Gerhard Erasmus has a side that competes for twenty overs and has not yet worked out how to compete for fifty.