Namibia Beat South Africa by 18 Runs — Windhoek Gets Its Night

Associate cricket produces two kinds of good day. There is the one where the big team plays badly and loses, and everyone talks afterwards about what the big team got wrong. And there is the rarer one, the one worth keeping, where the smaller side simply plays the better cricket for forty overs and the result is not an accident. Windhoek got the second kind on Friday.

Namibia won the first match of their tri-series by 18 runs, and the margin understates it. They were 84 for 0 after nine and a half overs, they conceded 34 for 2 in the powerplay defending, and at no stage after the sixth over of the chase did South Africa look likely — except through Dewald Brevis, who played superbly and alone. Gerhard Erasmus's side has been doing this to visiting teams at the Namibia Cricket Ground for a few years now. It is starting to stop being a surprise.

South Africa won the toss, looked at a dry Windhoek surface and bowled, which was defensible and turned out to be the first thing that went wrong. Louren Steenkamp and Jan Frylinck put on 84 in 9.4 overs against an attack that had no answer to the straight boundary. The powerplay went for 57 without loss. Frylinck, a left-armer who bats like a man who resents being called an all-rounder, reached fifty from 36 balls with six fours and a six and made 60 from 38 in all. Steenkamp's 41 came from 29. The first ten overs produced 100 runs.

What followed was a middle-order stall so abrupt it nearly rescued South Africa. Namibia went from 116 for 2 in the thirteenth over to 133 for 6 in the seventeenth, losing four wickets for seventeen runs and three of them — Erasmus, Zane Green, JJ Smit — inside eight deliveries either side of the sixteenth over. Prenelan Subrayen's offspin took three of the middle order for 32; Bjorn Fortuin, captaining, bowled four overs for 17 and removed both openers. It was intelligent, patient spin bowling and it should have won the match.

It did not, because Ruben Trumpelmann hit 12 from 6 at the death and Alexander Busing-Volschenk stayed unbeaten on 13, and 133 for 6 became 163 for 9. Thirty runs from the last four overs on a night when 145 proved unchaseable is the whole difference in the match, and nobody will write a headline about it.

Trumpelmann then opened the bowling and effectively ended the game inside the powerplay. He had Lhuan-dre Pretorius caught for 9 and, later, Rubin Hermann bowled for 12 and Brevis caught at the end of the eighteenth over — three for 24 from his four, the most economical seam spell of the night on either side. Jack Brassell had Jordan Hermann caught in the third over. Max Heingo bowled Tony de Zorzi. South Africa were 39 for 3 by the seventh over, 86 for 5 by the fourteenth, and required more than ten an over for the rest of the innings with Brevis running out of partners in real time.

The captain's over deserves a mention. Gerhard Erasmus bowled two of them, for seven runs, and one of those deliveries bowled the opposition captain for a two-ball duck. Erasmus has been leading this team for years on the principle that a Namibian side has to be more precise than the opposition rather than more talented, and a 2-0-7-1 from the man setting the fields is that principle in miniature.

Dewald Brevis was magnificent and it counted for nothing, which is the oldest and cruellest sentence in the game. He came in at 19 for 2 in the fourth over, with the required rate already climbing and the innings in the state where a 23-year-old with his shot-making reputation is usually told to steady things. He did the opposite, correctly: fifty from 39 balls, five sixes, 75 from 50 in the end, at a strike rate of 150 while the other nine batters in the innings managed 66 between them at barely a run a ball.

He was caught by Brassell off Trumpelmann on the last delivery of the eighteenth over with South Africa 133 for 6 and thirty-one still needed. Duan Jansen, on T20I debut and already the owner of two wickets, hit 25 not out from 17 and swung at everything, but JJ Smit's final over took the last two wickets — Nqobani Mokoena caught at long-on, Prenelan Subrayen caught off the final ball of the match — and 145 for 9 was where it stopped.

The pitch was a good one and both innings say so. There were 308 runs and eighteen wickets in forty overs; the spinners on both sides were the most economical bowlers on show — Fortuin 4.25, Erasmus 3.50, Subrayen 8.00 with three wickets — and the seamers who hit a hard length were expensive on both sides except Trumpelmann. Windhoek's altitude gives the ball carry, which is why the two teams struck eleven sixes between them, and why 163 was worth rather more than it would have been at sea level. The chasing side's powerplay — 34 for 2 against Namibia's 57 for 0 — is the cleanest single comparison available.

JJ Smit took the award for 3 for 31, and it was the right call even though Trumpelmann's figures were better and Frylinck's 60 set the total up. Smit bowled the seventeenth over and the twentieth — the two hardest overs in a defence of 163 — removed Connor Esterhuizen when South Africa were rebuilding at 86 for 5, and then closed the match out with two wickets in the final over. He also made a two-ball duck. There is a particular satisfaction in a night where a player contributes nothing whatsoever with the bat and still walks off with the match.

CricIntel did not preview this tri-series opener, so there is no prediction to grade — we had this fixture in the schedule as a South Africa warm-up and treated it accordingly, which is a judgement the result has answered on our behalf. The honest note to carry forward is that Namibia at home are not a team to be listed as a formality, and we will be previewing the rest of this series properly.

Namibia take 2 points and the early lead in a three-way series that also involves Zimbabwe. South Africa — a young, experimental group under Fortuin, with Jansen debuting and Pretorius, Brevis and the Hermann brothers all in the early stages of their international careers — play Zimbabwe next at the same ground, and will need a considerably broader batting effort than one man making half their runs. For Namibia the question is whether they can do it twice; the last four overs of their own innings, the thirty runs from 133 for 6, is the part they should study hardest, because that is the passage most likely to decide the next one too.