Aiden Markram’s magnificent century guided South Africa to a five-wicket win over Australia in the World Test Championship final at Lord’s late yesterday as the Proteas finally ended their decades-long wait for a major global cricket trophy.
South Africa, set 282 to win, finished on 282-5 before lunch on the fourth day, with opening batsman Markram out for 136 when his side were just six runs shy of victory.
Markram has been dropped twice by South Africa in his test career.
Photo: AFP
Markram set such a superlative standard out of the gate — three centuries and two 90s in his first six months — that when the runs stopped raining, he was labeled a flash in the pan.
South Africa’s white-ball captain was eventually recalled to the red-ball side by new coach Shukri Conrad at the start of 2023 and responded with his first century in two years against the West Indies and 106 against India in Cape Town, South Africa, to end that year.
Markram then went 16 innings and counting without a hundred, including a duck when he chopped on against Australia pacer Mitchell Starc on Wednesday, the opening day of the World Test Championship final at Lord’s.
On Friday, South Africa needed someone to hang tough and score big when it started a daunting chase of 282 to win the final, and Markram responded on a flat, slow pitch with an unbeaten 102. He and captain Temba Bavuma, who nursed a hamstring injury to be on 65, produced an unbroken stand of 143.
Markram teared up when he reached his eighth test hundred in the day’s second-to-last over. His celebrations were muted, knowing the job was not quite done. He and Bavuma have South Africa 69 runs from a momentous win.
“We certainly know he is someone for the big occasion, of that there is no doubt,” South Africa batting coach Ashwell Prince said. “He has done some technical work, but not a lot. In the last little while he has had a tendency to push his hands away from his body and cut across the ball but it was not a big fix and as soon as he saw a few videos, it was simple.”
“Albeit in a losing cause at Newlands, on a difficult pitch, he played an unbelievable innings against India last year and scored a ton on that surface — so we know what he is capable of,” Prince said.
Despite the first-innings duck, Markram remained confident in his technique after scoring five fifties in 13 innings at the Indian Premier League. They were not in the same format, but they put him in a good headspace for the WTC final.
He is in the running for the player of the final. When Bavuma turned to Markram’s part-time off-spin — three wickets in 45 previous tests — he had an outsized impact on the match.
In the first innings, he bagged Steve Smith and broke Australia’s biggest partnership, and in the second innings he ended Australia’s seemingly never-ending batting by dismissing last man Josh Hazlewood.
Moments later, he had his own bat in hand to open South Africa’s chase to win the championship.
TO THE TOP: After securing the international title on Saturday, Team Taiwan were to face Las Vegas to potentially win their 18th Little League World Series championship A team from Taipei’s Dong Yuan Elementary School won the Little League Baseball World Series’ international title on Saturday by defeating Aruba 1-0 in the annual baseball tournament held in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The Taiwan team, competing under the name Chinese Taipei, were after press time last night to face a team from Las Vegas, Nevada, which beat a team from Fairfield, Connecticut, in the US championship 8-2. Taiwan are seeking to win their first Little League Baseball World Series title since 1996. “Really haven’t taken a moment to data dump right now on Taiwan,” Nevada manager T.J. Fescher said. “They’re a
Marc Marquez continued his winning streak as he cruised to victory in the Hungarian GP sprint by two seconds on Saturday night to pad his championship lead. It was a seventh straight Sprint victory for the Spaniard, who has also won the last six longer Sunday grand prix races on his factory Ducati. Fabio Di Giannantonio, an Italian with the VR46 Ducati satellite team was a distant second at Balaton Park, followed by his team-mate and compatriot Franco Morbidelli third. Marquez, a six-time world champion, started the race from pole position. “I felt someone really close on the first corner, from there I
Former European champions Celtic exited the UEFA Champions League in the qualifiers after a 3-2 penalty shoot-out defeat at Kazakhstan’s Kairat Almaty on Tuesday, following two goalless legs in the playoff tie. Kairat are to compete in the competition proper for the first time, while Norway’s Bodo/Glimt and Cyprus’s Pafos also secured debut appearances after coming through the playoffs. Celtic’s night ended in disappointment as they missed three penalties in the shoot-out, Daizen Maeda failing with the decisive spot-kick. The slugfest of a match went into extra-time with neither side finding the net and few overall chances, echoing the first
Russian Diana Shnaider continued her impressive winning streak in tour-level finals at the Monterrey Open on Saturday, beating compatriot Ekaterina Alexandrova 6-4, 4-6, 6-4 in the WTA 500 event’s final. Shnaider had little trouble in the opening set but struggled in a topsy-turvy second, as Alexandrova clinched the set’s fifth and decisive break at 5-4 to force a decider. Third-seed Shnaider carved out an advantage early on in the third set when she broke Alexandrova in the first game and held serve to go 2-0 up, an advantage she would not relinquish. World No. 12 Shnaider is now unbeaten in her last five
RSS