South Africa vs India 2023-24

Twenty20 internationals (3): South Africa 1, India 1
One-day internationals (3): South Africa 1, India 2
Test matches (2): South Africa 1 (12pts), India 1 (10pts)

India enthusiastically embraced the idea that South Africa was their "last frontier". Everything about this tour was built around winning a Test series there for the first time, after seven defeats, and a draw in 2010-11.

The T20 and one-day internationals were so peripheral that the tourists' Test team played an intra-squad three-day game while the ODIs were going on.

That made a thumping innings defeat in the opening Test at Centurion even more crushing than the scoreline suggests: it meant what was surely the last chance for Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma to be a part of one of the final pieces of Test history they still craved was gone.

Cape Town then hosted the shortest completed Test in history, spanning 107 overs, after South Africa were bowled out for 55 on the first morning. India won a helter-skelter game to make it 1-1, with the two-Test series done and dusted in less than four and a half days' play; the Newlands surface, meanwhile, was rated "unsatisfactory" by the ICC.

Deprived South African fans had waited nine months for Test cricket - and would have to wait almost a year for more on home soil. Their team then will be without Dean Elgar, who bowed out with 5,347 runs from 86 matches, to start a county stint with Essex. The last of his 14 centuries - a seven-hour 185 - set up the win in Centurion, but he could do little about the manic match at Cape Town, where he had to deputise as captain following an injury to Temba Bavuma.

South Africa's star at Newlands was Aiden Markram, who made a century while the next-highest score was 12, but he was trumped by a dominant performance from India's seamers, notably the bustling Mohammed Siraj, who took six for 15 on the first morning.

The T20 series which started the tour was shared. The first match was washed out, but Reeza Hendricks helped South Africa chase down a DLS target of 152 in the second, to nullify Rinku Singh's 68 not out from 39 balls. Finally Suryakumar Yadav, with a 56-ball hundred, led India to a big total at the Wanderers, before Kuldeep Yadav took five wickets as South Africa slid to an embarrassing 95 all out.

The ODIs began with India's back-up seamers, Arshdeep Singh and Avesh Khan, sharing nine wickets to skittle South Africa for 116, rather ruining the annual Pink Day fundraiser at the Wanderers. Tony de Zorzi's maiden international century helped square the series at Gqeberha. The decider, at Paarl, was another one-sided contest, with Sanju Samson making his own maiden hundred to set up a total that proved well beyond the hosts.