Klusener helps bury Edgbaston ghost

It was the sort of batting revival which was more in keeping with the World Cup than the emotion-charged early evening at an over-flowing Wanderers but South Africa came back almost from the dead to bury the Edgbaston ghost. While it was a flashing Mark Boucher cover drive which sealed a six-wickets victory over Australia yesterday to take the Challenge Series trophy it was man of the match Lance Klusener who pulled the lower-order together to tie up the victory.

Exhibiting the sort of batting flair which has been missing from his limited-overs game plan for a lengthy portion of the second half of this season Klusener, it is easy to imagine, dreamed about this victory for 10 months between this third game in late highveld autumn and the tied game against the Aussies last June. An unbroken seventh-wicket partnership of 87 off 96 balls between Klusener and Boucher wrested the initiative from the Aussies after cautious start.

You could not get a much more dramatic stage than a packed, raucous bullring either as on a pitch far from easy and helped the swing bowlers throughout the day Klusener took hold of a what had been a jittery innings to help steer it to 209 for six in response to the Wizards of Oz's 205.

While Klusener reacted with a typical modest "thank goodness" to the query that he had discovered form at the right time, Shaun Pollock, playing his 100th match for South Africa felt the "stubborn character of Klusener and Boucher" did as much to ensure victory, forgetting to mention his own efforts as a bowler with his four for 37. Which supports Pollock's initial thought of "a great all-round team effort" being the main reason South Africa won the series 2-1 and set up the August series in Melbourne's new massive indoor for arena. It is going to be an enticing showdown all right between the two strongest sides in the LOI arena.

Steve Waugh agreed that South Africa was the "better side" on the final day of the three-match series.

At one stage South Africa's image as chokers started to surface as the side slipped from 91 for two to 91 for five and then 122 for six as first Andrew Hall's departure to a Shane Warne delivery, followed by Jacques Kallis and Nicky Boje gave a bleak picture as the biggest crowd in the Wanderers history fell silent.

While it was Warne, who had taken some stick from Kallis in his opening over, being planted for three boundaries, who enticed Hall to fall to a soft dismissal, the return of Brett Lee was enough to rip the middle apart at the seams. Bowling the second fastest delivery in the history of the game 156 k/ph one to Hall and the other to Kallis the fast bowler also known as Wollongong Whizz, was a couple of only 2k/ph slower than Shoaib Akhtar.

It was the sort of pressure conditions in which South Africa have often revelled. This time it was the mentally tough Boucher who worked his way through the difficult patch with Jonty Rhodes. South Africa lost three wickets during a spell of 70 balls while scoring only 20 runs. There was little surprise when Rhodes departed Warne's second wicket as the leg-spinner, after going for 20 in two overs then bowled two consecutive maidens.

The experiment of using Hall as an opener may or may not be repeated: perhaps the selectors felt that as the Wanderers is his home ground they might as well make the alteration and dropped Herschelle Gibbs to three and kept Kallis at four.

Steve Waugh called on eight bowlers during the innings in the hope to break the seventh wicket partnership but nothing went the way of the Australians and when Klusener hammered two boundaries off Glenn McGrath's ninth over the big left-hander smashed the grip the big Australian opening bowler had in the opening overs as he tested and probed the new-look first-wicket partnership. Klusener's innings was greeted with the sort of delight you would expect from a partisan crowd: his 52 off 50 balls was punctuated with nine fours, two of them off McGrath.

If Klusener's batting with the lower-order prop Boucher giving South Africa the chance to win the game, Australia's batting lacked the purpose and flair we had seen at Newlands on Friday night. It could have been Pollock's winning the toss and sending in the visitors on a pitch which seamed around and had the batsmen battling to handle the response from Pollock and Mornantau Hayward.

It was an interesting ploy to open the bowling with Hayward instead of Kallis but his rocket-like pace had the top-order in early trouble and Mark Waugh's wicket was a just reward for his efforts.

Had it not been for Steve Waugh with an innings of 51, who did what he could to keep the innings afloat and the efforts of Ian Harvey and Warne, adding an important 51 runs to the innings, the Aussies may not have posted what was considered a competitive total. It need a lot of hard work and rotation of the strike to get some spark back into their efforts.