Va-va-voom Varma powers India to unbeatable series lead

If you take the sane option to travel from Johannesburg to Centurion – the Gautrain, rather than sit trapped in just another rubberised lump of metal and glass in the slow-moving traffic sewer misnamed the highway – try to find a seat that puts you on the right-hand side of the carriage and facing in the same direction in which the train is going.

Then enjoy the Highveld fleeting by while you wait. Not to reach your destination, but for what happens in the last minute or so before the train pulls into the station. As you are eased around the final bend, the ground itself sweeps into view.

First come the floodlights at the Hennops River End to the south, then the green blaze of the eastward grass bank, then, to the north, the vast blue-seated, solar-panel-roofed curve of the only stand. It’s difficult not to think the train is giving the ground a hug.

Until August, the stand was at what used to be known, blandly, as the Pavilion End. In August a sponsorship agreement with a funeral services company attached the firm’s name to the end. Happily, that gives us licence, considering the business the sponsors are in, to call it the Dead End. And to wonder what death bowling from that end might be like.

Exactly a dozen seconds after the initial glimpse of the pylons, the ground has raced into the recent past. But you know it’s there, and that’s oddly reassuring. Although it isn’t as if someone might have moved it, seeing for yourself that it has remained where it was when you last left it satisfies an entirely human need for certainty and consistency in an uncertain and inconsistent world.

Once you alight, don’t take a cab to the ground, which is now a kilometre back from whence you came. Instead, to get the full experience, walk. You will have to negotiate the awfulness of crossing West Avenue, where some of the world’s most feral drivers roam with impunity, but it’s nothing that can’t be accomplished by jaywalking tactically. Also, the adrenaline rush will get you to the ground faster.

Of course, the South Africa and India men’s squads did not take the train to Centurion for the third T20I on Wednesday. They could have and should have, and maybe some of them would have had they been given the choice. But traffic sewers are more gentle on the soul when your journey is lubricated, for and aft, by a police escort; blue lights leaking luridly into the hot and heavy afternoon air.

A bright morning had melted into an afternoon muddled with clouds, though not the sort that bring the wrath of the weather gods down on this harsh place. That happened on Tuesday night, when fire and brimstone poured forth from the sky with such visceral violence that streets and squares were transformed into shallow but deepening ponds. But there was little evidence of that by the morning. The thirsty earth had swallowed almost every last drop.

What difference might the unseen but additional moisture make to the conditions? When Marco Jansen speared Sanju Samson’s guard and nailed his off stump with the second delivery of the match – in St George’s Park on Sunday Jansen’s third ball hit Samson’s leg stump – it seemed we had an answer. But then it started raining. Runs, not water.

Tilak Varma paid Jansen the respect of defending the next delivery. That done, he slashed a short, wide effort through backward point for four. Then he advanced down the pitch, flung his hands through his stroke with such vigour that the ball flew over the deep third boundary. Having not conceded a run in the first half of the over, Jansen went for 12 in the second half. Abhishek Sharma watched all that and then climbed in himself, hammering Gerald Coetzee for four through midwicket, six over point and four through extra cover in an over of audacity that sailed for 15 runs. Clearly, all that rain hadn’t thickened the Highveld’s famously thin air.

And so it went for 52 balls while Abhishek and Varma shared 107 with indecent haste. The seven fours and eight sixes they reaped amounted to 71.03% of the partnership. It was hitting as fabulous as it was furious.

Until it wasn’t. Abhishek, Suryakumar Yadav and Hardik Pandya were dismissed for the addition of 25 runs in the space of 23 deliveries. But va-va-voom Varma stayed, and kept scoring. He faced only four fewer deliveries than Rinku Singh in their 30-ball stand of 58, but owned 45 of those runs.

Varma found another willing partner in debutant Ramandeep Singh, who hammered the first ball he faced at this level down the ground for six. Now the bowler, Andile Simelane – who did the same to Ravi Bishnoi on his debut at Kingsmead on Friday – knows how it feels.

A hot smoked boundary through long-off off Lutho Sipamla took Varma to his first T20I century off 51 balls, 68 drilled in fours and sixes, with nine balls left in the innings. He sprinted halfway to the boundary, in the direction of the dressing room, to celebrate. Once he stopped, he took off his helmet, took a bow, punched the air and looked like he might levitate with joy. And why not. No-one begrudged him his long moment of joy. When you bat like Varma did, you can pretty much do what you please to mark the moment.

Especially when this happens and you’re just 22 years and five days old. Eleven other players have made 20 T20I centuries for India, but only Yashasvi Jaiswal has been younger than Varma. Jaiswal had been alive for 21 years and 279 days when he scored 100 against Nepal in Hangzhou in China in October 2023.

Varma’s unbeaten 107 took India to 219/6, the highest total of this series and the fifth time they have passed 200 in their last seven T20Is batting first. South Africa fell apart the last time it happened – on Friday, when they were bowled out for 141 on a perfect batting surface. Just like Centurion’s was. Would they give a better account of themselves?

The question was still hanging in the air when play was suspended, after an over, because of what else was in the air. The ground had been swarmed by so many flying ants that the umpires feared they might fly into eyes. Arshdeep Singh spent more time trying to escape the bugs’ attentions than running in and bowling that first over.

Flying ants take to the skies after rain in what are called “nuptial flights” to enable the virgin queens to mate with males. The males promptly die after their union. The queens ditch their wings and get on with the business of establishing new colonies. You have the time to find all that out when an insect invasion stops play for 26 minutes. And to add flying ants to the list of unusual interruptions that have struck cricket matches – from bees to smoke alarms set off by a piece of burnt toast, to lost drivers piloting their cars onto the field, to various animals, to the late delivery of Halal lunches, to flying bombs almost landing on the outfield, to a solar eclipse, to the sun shining directly into batters’ eyes, to balls landing in spectators’ food and having to be degreased.

Presently a member of the ground-staff arrived at the edge of pitch with what looked like a four-wheeled vacuum cleaner, presumably to scoop up the many males who had met their end there. Oh, the indignity.

Targets of more than 200 had been successfully chased in Centurion in three previous T20Is, but only once by the South Africans – who had lost three times despite passing 200. The home side had made more than that to win batting second four times; most recently at this ground in March 2023 when they scored 259/4 to beat West Indies.

But this India team run on a higher octane of ambition than most, and South Africa’s reply fitted and started to 84/4 after 10. Heinrich Klaasen and David Miller fanned the embers in their stand of 58 off 35, which was punctuated most memorably by Klaasen hoisting Varun Chakravarthy for a hattrick of arching sixes over long-on in the 14th – and, off the next ball, being dropped by Suryakumar in the covers.

Klaasen holed out to Arshdeep on the cover boundary in the 18th for 41 off 22, leaving 53 to get off 14. Even Klaasen would have found that challenging, but without him South Africa had no chance.

But that brought Tristan Stubbs and Coetzee, the same pair who shared an unbroken 42 off 20 to win from a difficult position on Sunday, together again. And when Jansen launched Pandya for three fours and two sixes in a 19th over that bled 26 runs, something flickered.

Only to die like a freshly sated male flying ant when Arshdeep trapped Jansen in front with the third ball of the 20th. But Jansen went with honour, his 54 – a first T20I half-century – flew off 17 balls. He hit all but eight of his runs in fours and sixes.

India’s win, by 11 runs, means they can no longer lose the series. And that South Africa can no longer win it. Indeed, South Africa will go eight bilateral series in the format without winning, which they last did against Ireland in August 2022.

The Gautrain had closed up shop for the night by the time the match was over. But with less riding on Friday’s game at the Wanderers than might have been the case, why would the players not stay in Centurion overnight and take the train back to Jo’burg in the morning? Come on, they know they want to…