Not choking – just unlucky, Proteas

Predictably, the couch coaches are crying that, yet again, our national cricket team, the Proteas, has choked in being beaten in the T20 World Cup final.

We know that South Africa, as a nation, is sport-crazy and that any loss is taken as a personal injury.

And that is no bad thing, because we expect our sports teams to fly our flag proudly.

Yet, the reality is that sport generally means you have winners and losers.

And often a team loses because it is beaten by a better side or by a better side and a dollop of luck.

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That, we would suggest, is what happened to us against India on Saturday.

Sure, maybe Heinrich Klaasen shouldn’t have flashed at a ball wide of off stump and got caught behind, especially after he hit 24 runs to set up the Proteas with a target of 30 runs off 30 balls.

With a manageable target, maybe David Miller didn’t need to try and whack one out of the park – only to be caught on the boundary in a piece of cricketing brilliance by Suryakumar Yadav.

Does that amount to choking?

No. It was a hard-fought game where one team was better (and luckier) than the other.