The stage is set, as Dale Steyn, South Africa’s premier fast bowler, comes in to bowl his most crucial over of the 2015 World Cup, but even he might not have been expecting what would come next.

Steyn, who averaged 23.37 across formats with the ball and ended his career with a whopping 699 wickets, and is considered a true modern-day fast bowling great in his own right — bowls the ball slightly wider to evade the batter’s radar as the noise in the packed Eden Park stands builds up to a crescendo.

As the ball makes contact with New Zealand’s Grant Elliot’s bat at the other end, the match ends with an act that few could have predicted at the start of play. The ball whistles off the bat into the packed stands, whose 41,000 spectators erupt in jubilation to absolutely deafening noise — the raw emotion that cricket stadiums in New Zealand experience on only the rarest of occasions.

That South African team had names on its roster that would walk into a World XI any day of the week, from the swashbuckling opener Hashim Amla to Mr 360 himself — AB de Villiers who perfected finishing an innings in cricket into an art form with his shots that left no part of the ground outside his reach.

They were coupled with a three-man pace attack in Steyn, Morne Morkel and Vernon Philander — who especially in the longer form of the game, would rival all-time best pace attacks — such as the fearsome quartet of the West Indies from the 80s and Pakistan’s very own trio of Imran Khan, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis in their heyday.

However, this is just scratching the surface — let’s travel further back — it’s the 1999 World Cup, South Africa men’s Lance Klusener is on strike in the last over against Australia in the semi-final.

Klusener, who would end up as the player of the 1999 World Cup with a ridiculous average of 140.5, has to get nine runs off the last over the match. With the incredible form he was in, this ought to have been a walk in the park and the next two deliveries follow that script.

Both deliveries by Damien Flemming were thrashed to the cover boundary by Klusener, who up until that moment had played the tournament like a man possessed — seemingly with just a single thought in his mind — to make South Africa the champions of the world.

With the scores level and just a single needed to book them a booth in the final against Pakistan — the unthinkable happened as both Klusener and Alan Donald ended up at the non-striker end — with Australia completing the easiest of run outs to tie the match, advancing to the final due to superior net run-rate and subsequently going on to lift the World Cup.

What could have been a famous victory for the ages, has been etched in South African cricketing history for all the wrong reasons. Their 1999 semi-final tie with Australia still stands as one of the most shocking World Cup exits for South Africa and its ghost continues to haunt them to this day, having never won an ICC tournament since.

‘The more you play’

Cue to present day — with South Africa having just hammered England in their last match, they are well on their way into the semi-finals of the 2025 ICC Champions Trophy.

Leading up to the tournament, most of the South African squad barring a few got the chance to familiarise themselves in the conditions in Pakistan by playing matches in a tri-series with New Zealand and hosts Pakistan in Karachi and Lahore, both venues for the Champions Trophy that was held within a week after the tri-series ended.

Responding to a question by Dawn.com regarding the tri-series being helpful for the South African squad to prepare for the Champions Trophy, Proteas batter Rassie Van der Dussen said, “Yes, I think so, it certainly [helped] for the players who were here; the more you play in one place the more advantageous it is for you.”

Earlier on Friday, responding to Dawn.com on the topic at the pre-match press conference, South Africa men’s ODI coach Rob Walter said, “Yeah, I think any experience in the subcontinent is valuable.

“Certainly, the tri-series was valuable for us, albeit that there was a large portion of the squad that wasn’t there, but they have been to Pakistan before. But all in all, it was a great exercise.

“[We] would have loved to have had one more game in that final, just to sort of tick it all off. But yeah, we’re pretty happy. We started the competition well on the back of some individually good performances in the tri-series. But as we’ve learned with cricket, conditions change all the time.”

‘We can pave the way forward’

However, with all the familiarity with the conditions being helpful to their campaign so far — there is a glitch in the matrix in the form of potentially unfamiliar conditions for them going into the semi-finals — increasingly evident as South Africa board a possibly redundant flight to Dubai.

Due to India’s refusal to tour Pakistan for reasons known only to New Delhi’s BJP-run government, both South Africa and Australia — the two semi-finalists from group ‘B’ have travelled to Dubai. As only one of them would be playing their semi-final against India in Dubai, the other would be back on a flight to Lahore to play the other knock-out match there on Wednesday — presumingly making the trip just to stop at the airport duty free shop for a quick souvenir.

To the contrary, South Africa won’t be wasting their energies thinking about that inconvenience or the more sinister fact that’s on the back of everyone’s mind but shall only be spoken of as it’s in the past. That statistic being that South Africa are yet to win an ICC ODI trophy this century, with their last and only being the ICC Knockout cup — ironically the old name of the ongoing tournament — back in 1998.

“It is what it is,” van der Dussen said to reporters after South Africa’s win, adding that the arrangements of playing at just one venue for all their matches were undoubtedly advantageous to the Indian team.

“If you can stay in one place, stay in one hotel, practice in the same facilities, play in the same stadium, on the same pitches every time, it’s definitely an advantage,” he said.

“I don’t think you have to be a rocket scientist to know that (but) the onus would be on them to use that advantage.”

South African left-arm spinner Keshav Maharaj made abundantly clear what the players felt going into an ICC tournament knockout match in the aftermath of what was essentially a tick all the boxes kind of day for them in the field.

When asked by Dawn.com about how the players felt about South Africa’s record of not winning an ICC ODI trophy since 1998, Maharaj said, “I think those are past generations, we are the more recent generation and I think we’ve had a significant amount of success since then as a nation.”

“We play together as a unit, and we’ve made it to the semi-final of the previous ICC World Cup as well as the final of the T20 World Cup,” Maharaj said after the match.

“Now we’re looking at another semi-final, and the guys are motivated more than anything,” he added.

“We can’t dwell on the past, but we can pave the way forward,” he concluded.

South Africa will also be looking to finally put the label that should not be spoken of behind them this week, but only time will tell whether this will finally be their year or not.

It would certainly be a day to remember for a whole generation of South African cricket fans — who have grown up watching their favourite players, with more than a few cricketing greats amongst them — going without the silverware on the biggest of occasions.

Header image: South African bowler Dale Steyn sits dejected after their loss in the World Cup semi-final between New Zealand and South Africa at Eden Park in Auckland. — AFP/File