With their backs to the wall, Durban’s Super Giants nearly blew a pulverising start to their innings before registering a jittery two-wicket win over log-leaders Sunrisers Eastern Cape in their Betway SA20 cricket match at St George’s Park on Sunday.
After the home team batted first when skipper Tristan Stubbs won the toss, they had to extricate themselves from the dodgy position of 87/5 after 18 overs.
Thanks to a brilliant unbroken sixth-wicket partnership of 71 in 6.2 overs by Stubbs and Lewis Gregory, the Sunrisers reached a relatively decent total of 158/6.
This set the stage for a batting onslaught from Durban’s Super Giants in which the visitors smashed their way to 71/1 in the six-over powerplay, setting themselves up for what seemed would be a relatively comfortable victory.
But the Sunrisers have not gained the reputation as one of the toughest sides to beat in the competition for nothing, and they fought back with outstanding determination to ensure the match went down to the wire.
Eventually, with only two wickets left, the Super Giants needed four runs off the final over bowled by Anrich Nortje to win the game, and after scrambling three runs from two balls, Evan Jones pierced the covers off the next delivery for the winning boundary.
Earlier, Aiden Markram, a familiar figure in these parts after captaining the Sunrisers for the first three seasons of the competition, set the tone for the Super Giants’ response with five fours off the second over bowled by Adam Milne.
He and Marques Ackerman never let the Sunrisers attack settle, and when the dust had cleared after the powerplay, they had done significant damage by reaching 71/1.
Markram (25 off 13 balls) was the batsman to fall in that period, out to a magnificent catch by Marco Jansen, whose long arms enabled him to intercept the ball as it was about to disappear over the long-off boundary.
However, it was a temporary blip on the Super Giants’ run-chase because Ackerman continued to pile on the pressure.
The luckless recipient was opening bowler Milne, who just could not find his normally tight range and travelled for 40 runs in his first two overs.
That largely negated the 39 runs Stubbs and Gregory took off the final two overs of the Sunrisers innings.
It was then that the Sunrisers showed proper grit to give themselves a real chance of snatching victory, only for the Super Giants to keep their competition hopes alive in the dying moments of the game.
In the home team’s innings, the Super Giants’ spin trio of Sunil Narine, who opened the bowling, Noor Lakanwal and Liam Livingstone had put the chokehold on the home team batting.
They not only restricted the scoring but also kept chipping away with wickets, and it took a batting partnership of common sense and immense character from Stubbs (47 off 30 balls) and Gregory (25 off 17 balls) to retrieve the situation.
It would have been easy to panic, but sensing that the conditions did not allow for easy strokeplay, they bided their time.
Eventually, it rained boundaries as they got stuck into Gerald Coetzee and Kwena Maphaka in the closing overs.
It gave the Sunrisers a real chance of consolidating their position at the top of the log, but the Super Giants’ blistering start meant they were able to withstand the serious wobble during the rest of their innings to record a rare win — their second in 10 matches — over the Eastern Cape franchise.
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