South Africa v India, 2011-12

Twenty20 international (1): South Africa 1,India 0

In January 2011, South Africa and India provided the focal point in a night of "cricketainment" at a packed Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban, built specifically for the 2010 football World Cup. Filled to capacity at 50,000, it was the largest attendance for a cricket match on the African continent. A Bollywood song-and-dance extravaganza starring Kolkata Knight Riders owner Shah Rukh Khan followed the Twenty20 match, and the event was such a success that both boards immediately agreed to a sequel.

A year is a long time in sport, however, and the magic could not be repeated - certainly not away from Durban, home to the world's biggest Indian diaspora. A game at the Wanderers was shoehorned into the schedule eight days after the Asia Cup, three days after South Africa had finished their Test series in New Zealand, and five days before the IPL. To cap it off, the final of South Africa's domestic Twenty20 tournament(to be held on the same ground) was postponed by 24 hours. Without any obvious justification for the fixture, it became a "tribute match" to Jacques Kallis - although it would have made more sense to pay homage to a Cape Town boy at Newlands. The South Africans did not even hold a pre-match training session.

A contribution was made to the Jacques Kallis Scholarship Foundation, which had been helping underprivileged children with schooling and cricketing education for six years, and Kallis made a donation of his own to the recently established Yuvraj Singh Foundation to assist cancer sufferers. Thankfully, much good was done, because as a one-off game of international cricket, it ranked among the most irrelevant of all time.

Match reports for

Only T20I: South Africa v India at Johannesburg, Mar 30, 2012
Report | Scorecard