The tie that sent Australia through: Edgbaston, June 1999
Two teams level on runs, level on wickets, and a last-wicket run out that settled nothing on the scoreboard but everything in the tournament. Australia went through to the final on a Super Six placing, and South Africa were left to replay the finish for years afterward.
The group that set it up
Australia and South Africa arrived at Edgbaston for the second semi-final of the 1999 World Cup having already played each other once in the tournament, in the Super Six stage, where South Africa had won a rain-affected match with Australia needing to win every remaining game just to stay alive. They had done exactly that, scraping through on net run rate ahead of New Zealand, a form of second chance that made the pressure on this match, for Australia especially, close to unbearable. Steve Waugh captained Australia, Hansie Cronje South Africa, and both sides had spent the tournament looking like the team most likely to win it.
South Africa won the toss and chose to field on a pitch that would end up offering more to the bowlers than either captain expected.
Australia collapse, then recover
Australia lost Mark Waugh in the first over, caught behind off Shaun Pollock without scoring, and never established the platform a semi-final chase would want. Ricky Ponting made 37 and Adam Gilchrist 20, but by the time Steve Waugh came together with Michael Bevan the score was 68 for 4 and the innings needed rebuilding from the middle. Waugh made 56 and Bevan 65, the pair adding 90 for the fifth wicket, before both fell in the space of three balls: Waugh caught behind off Pollock, Tom Moody lbw first ball. Shane Warne then helped Bevan add 49 for the seventh wicket, batting with the tail to push the total past 200, before Bevan himself was last man out for 65, the final wicket to fall at 213. Australia had been bowled out for 213, Pollock finishing with 5 for 36 and Allan Donald 4 for 32.
It was a total that felt short of what the pitch and the occasion demanded, and South Africa, with Donald and Pollock both in form with the ball, looked the stronger side to defend it.
Klusener takes over
South Africa's reply followed a similar arc to Australia's innings: early trouble, a rebuild, and a collapse of their own when it mattered most. Herschelle Gibbs and Gary Kirsten put on 48 for the first wicket before both fell cheaply, and Jonty Rhodes and Jacques Kallis added 84 for the fifth wicket to push South Africa back into a winning position. Then Shane Warne, who had already dismissed Gibbs, Kirsten and Hansie Cronje, had Kallis caught by Steve Waugh, and South Africa slid from a position of comfort to 183 for 7. Warne finished with 4 for 29 from his 10 overs, a spell that turned the match as completely as any single bowling performance could.
Lance Klusener walked in with South Africa needing 31 more runs and only three wickets standing. What he did next is still talked about as one of the great one-day finishing performances: back-to-back boundaries off successive balls, calm running between the wickets, and an innings that dragged an apparently lost cause back to the very last over. He finished unbeaten on 31 from just 16 balls.
One run, two balls
By the time Damien Fleming ran in to bowl the final over, South Africa needed 9 runs from 6 balls with Klusener on strike and Allan Donald, the number 11, at the other end. Klusener hit the first two balls of the over for fours, both crashed back past the bowler with the sort of controlled violence that had already defined his tournament, and suddenly South Africa needed only one run from four balls to reach the final at Lord's.
It should have been the simplest equation in the match. It became the most chaotic.
The run out
Klusener drove the third ball back down the pitch and set off for the winning run without waiting to see where it had gone. Donald, unsighted at the non-striker's end, was almost run out backing up and had to scramble to regain his ground, losing his bat in the process. The two batters met mid-pitch in confusion, and by the time Donald turned to run, Mark Waugh had the ball. His throw to Adam Gilchrist behind the stumps arrived with Donald stranded well short of his ground. Gilchrist broke the stumps, and South Africa, needing one run to win a World Cup semi-final, were run out for 213, the same total Australia had made. The match was tied.
Under the tournament's rules a tied semi-final could not be settled by a bowl-out or a replay; the competition regulations sent the team with the better placing from the earlier Super Six stage through to the final instead. That team was Australia, who had finished above South Africa in the Super Six standings on points and net run rate despite losing to them in that head-to-head match, and it was Australia, not South Africa, who went on to play Pakistan at Lord's.
Why a tie sent one team through
Shane Warne, with 4 for 29 and the wicket of Cronje among his four, was named man of the match, but the game is remembered above all for its last over rather than any single individual contribution. It remains one of the most replayed finishes in one-day cricket, a match in which the team that did not lose still did not advance, a distinction that still frustrates South African cricket followers more than two decades later. Ties are rare enough in one-day internationals that the mechanism for breaking one, then and since, has mattered as much as the result on the field.
The full scorecard from that afternoon, ball by ball fall of wickets included, is on this page, and you can see how the two sides were assembled on the Australia and South Africa team pages. In The Chase you can put either XI out to bat first and see whether you can find the extra run that South Africa never quite got.
Sources
- CricArcade World Cup archive: the full scorecard, fall of wickets and partnerships on this page
- ESPNcricinfo: ICC World Cup 1999, second semi-final scorecard and report
- Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2000: the 1999 World Cup