At Moses Mabhida Stadium, Durban, January 9, 2011. India won by 21 runs. Toss: India. Twenty20
international debut: M. M. Patel.
The organisers certainly didn't lack ambition: they successfully aimed to assemble the largest
crowd ever to watch a cricket match on the African continent. They had three pegs on which to hang
their ambitions: a celebration of the arrival of the first indentured-labourer Indians in the country 150
years earlier, the final appearance of the officially retired Makhaya Ntini in a South African shirt…
and the really big one, which put most of the 50,000 bums on seats - a post-match concert by
Bollywood superstar (and Kolkata Knight Riders owner) Shah Rukh Khan.
Just visiting the architecturally magnificent stadium, built for the 2010 football World Cup and
named after a prominent former politician, was an event in itself. The square boundaries were shorter
than ICC regulations dictate and the one-off pitch played like the strip of bare rolled mud that it was,
but it hardly mattered.
The extravaganza was a tremendous success. Even the match itself, fourth on the priority list,
wasn't too bad. Ntini, unfortunately, showed why he had retired, but it simply didn't matter. He was
cheered all afternoon, if not quite as much as Shah Rukh was later in the evening. South Africa never
really threatened India's total, despite a whirlwind innings from opener Morne van Wyk on the day
he had been ignored in the IPL auction. Afterwards, South Africa's politicians and administrators
liked to believe they had proved it was not just India which did "sportainment", and there was talk
about making it an annual event.
Man of the Match: R. G. Sharma.