CHOKERS TO CHAMPIONS

Markram, Bavuma help South Africa achieve emotional five-wicket win over Aussies in WTC final

- Ashis Ray

LONDON: Chokers no more! Perennial stumblers at business ends of global competitions indeed a victim of stage fright as recently as in the ultimate stage of last year's T20 World Cup against India-South Africa laid to rest 27 years of an unenviable syndrome of so near yet so far.

Indeed, they did so by winning cricket's greatest and most prestigious prize the ICC World Test Championship in the 2023-25 cycle. They defeated the forever formidable Australia by five wickets at the game's centrestage, the Lord's Cricket Ground.

Their supporters sang and danced in joy.

South Africa were banned from international cricket when they were probably at their peak in the early 1970s and the Pollock brothers, Graeme and Peter, among others, were at their prime. Their government's Apartheid policy triggered this sanction by the international community. Welcomed back to the fold the previous year, at the 1992 Cricket World Cup in Australia, democratic and multiracial South Africa promised much, only to disappoint.

They have now come of age. It was their 'India 1983 moment', and the trophy was at the highest and most exacting strata of the game-Test cricket.