“S**t. Can you believe it’s already 20 years?” Makhaya Ntini exclaimed.
March 12 2006. The Wanderers. Australia vs South Africa in the fifth One-Day International to end a series that was high on quality, drama and was locked at 2-2. The previous game in Durban, two days before, had ended in a one wicket win for the tourists.
That was good for a Friday night — Sunday was better.
Australia 434/4. South Africa 438/9.
“No-one at that time thought about that, about seeing margins like that on a scoreboard,” Ntini said.
The Proteas may have won a World Test Championship, but “the 438 Game” remains the most famous cricket match this country has played. “Nowadays you have a T20 game where they score 250, but back then nobody thought like that … making 400, yoh.”
Ntini’s recollection of the day is vivid. It started when he bumped into Shaun Pollock — who missed the match with an injury — in the lift. “He said ‘Good morning,’” recalled Ntini. “How weird is that … it wasn’t good in the afternoon, but it was later that night.”
Australia chose to bat. Carnage ensued. “Ricky Ponting was hitting the ball over the stand into the flats, everytime,” said Ntini.
The Australian captain was a man on a mission that morning. His side had lost the first two matches in the series, including being bowled out for 93 at Newlands in Game 2, when Ntini took 6/22, still the third best figures by a South African bowler in ODIs.
But the Wanderers was different. A pure, easy-paced pitch with no movement and just enough bounce that the ball came comfortably into the hitting arc of the batters. There was also a short boundary on the main scoreboard side and Ponting was depositing the ball with ease into the adjacent block of flats. He hit nine sixes in his 164, which came off 105 balls. It was the best ODI innings most spectators had ever seen. A few hours later, they saw a better one.
As he left the field at the end of the Australia innings Ntini, who dismissed Simon Katich and conceded 88 runs in nine overs, remembered thinking: “S**t, I’ve done badly today.”
“When we got back into the changeroom, the coaches were tapping us on the shoulder, saying ‘bad luck’, but you know they really mean ‘what the hell were you doing?’” Ntini said, laughing.
Initially, lunch was very quiet. And then Jacques Kallis uttered the now famous line that the bowlers had done their jobs and Australia were 15 runs short, because it was a 450 wicket. Ntini remembers laughing and then seeing the Proteas coach and the senior batters drawing up a plan to chase 435.
At that stage, amid the ludicrous mini-targets being set, Ntini wasn’t part of the batting plan. He would, though, play a monumental role, in the afternoon’s epic conclusion.
But first Herschelle Gibbs. “When [Pollock and I] bumped into each other in the lift, we obviously didn’t know that Gibbs had only gone back to his room a couple of hours earlier,” said Ntini.
Other than Arthur, his assistant coach Vincent Barnes and captain Graeme Smith, no-one else in the squad knew about Gibbs’ big session at the hotel bar the night before. Arthur, Barnes and Smith briefly considered axing Gibbs from the starting team.
The fact that they didn’t led to an innings that now holds legendary status. “To see him express all his natural talent and play in such an uninhibited way was very special indeed,” Arthur wrote in his book, Taking the Mickey.
Gibbs made 175, hitting 21 fours and seven sixes. He got out with South Africa still 136 runs short of the target and almost 20 overs left.
“I remember Roger Telemachus hit a few shots, and then Johan Van der Wath also, Andrew Hall hit one four and then I had to bat,” Ntini said matter-of-factly. Van der Wath hit 35 off 18 balls, Telemachus, trying to atone for a dreadful penultimate over in which he bowled four no balls, scored 12 off six deliveries, and Hall hit a four and then got out with South Africa needing two runs to win.
Ntini said besides remembering being nervous, he can still see Mark Boucher walking towards him as he crossed the rope to go and bat and then exactly what his long-time provincial and national teammate said to him as they walked together to the middle.
I was talking to my son, Thando, about the match [on Monday] and I just laughed. Do you remember the Australian bowler, Mick Lewis? He dropped Gibbs and he conceded 100 runs [113 actually], that guy never wore that green cap again.
— Makhaya Ntini
“He told me, ‘Mak’, [Brett] Lee has two balls he will bowl to you, a yorker or the bouncer. Whatever you are going to do, if you block, duck, leave it and even if it goes straight to [Adam] Gilchrist, I’m running. So you run also.
‘The crowd was going berserk’
In his book Bouch: Through my eyes, the former Proteas wicketkeeper wrote: “So Brett Lee ran in, and Makhaya seemed momentarily frozen in time. It’s an in-swinging leg stump yorker. To this day, I cannot understand how he managed to work it down to third man. It defied all the angles and logic of cricket. And it came off the full face of the bat. It was a truly great shot. The best single run I ever saw.”
Ntini has watched that famous single about as many times as there were runs scored in that game. It elicited a roar as loud as the one that greeted the winning boundary hit by Boucher five minutes later.
So what happened to the bat? “I have it [at home] somewhere, I must find it. I must frame it,” he laughed.
“I was talking to my son, Thando, about the match [on Monday] and I just laughed. Do you remember the Australian bowler, Mick Lewis? He dropped Gibbs and he conceded 100 runs [113 actually], that guy never wore that green cap again,” said Ntini.
Lewis was but one of the characters on the most remarkable day of cricket in this country.
That match was the first in which a team scored 400 in an ODI. It has been done 28 times since and South Africa hold the record for the most ODI totals of 400 or more. But nothing ever compared to one total. It has its own name: The 438 game.
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