Four in four, and it was not an over

South Africa needed four runs to beat Sri Lanka at the 2007 World Cup. They had five wickets in hand and thirty-two balls left. Jacques Kallis was 86 not out and had been batting for three hours.

Lasith Malinga came back on for the forty-fifth over.

Why there was anything to defend

Sri Lanka had been 98 for five. Charl Langeveldt was taking five for 39 and the innings was most of the way to being over before lunch.

Tillakaratne Dilshan and Russel Arnold then put on 97 for the sixth wicket, which took most of two hours and neither of them ever looked like scoring quickly. Dilshan made 58, Arnold 50. Sri Lanka reached 195 for five and were then bowled out for 209, losing their last five wickets for fourteen runs.

Two hundred and nine was not a good total. It was, by about twenty runs, a total.

Two balls

Shaun Pollock went first. Four yorkers, then a slower ball, and he was beaten by it. Andrew Hall came in and scooped the next delivery straight to cover.

Two wickets in two balls, and South Africa were 206 for seven still needing four. Malinga's over ended there.

Someone else bowled the forty-sixth. A full over of six deliveries, by another bowler, with several minutes passing, before Malinga was given the ball again. That part has fallen out of the story entirely.

Two more

Kallis edged the first ball of the forty-seventh to Mark Boucher behind the stumps. The hat-trick, and the wicket of a man three runs from winning the match.

Makhaya Ntini could not get bat on the next one, a yorker at his boot. Four wickets in four balls, and no bowler had ever done it in a one-day international.

South Africa were 207 for nine.

Full scorecard: South Africa v Sri Lanka, Super Eights, Providence, 28 March 2007 →

They won anyway

Robin Peterson and Charl Langeveldt got the four runs. South Africa won by one wicket with ten balls to spare.

Malinga's final figures were 9.2–0–54–4. Langeveldt had taken 5 for 39 earlier in the day and shared the player-of-the-match award with him, which is what happens when the best performance in a match and the most famous one are not the same performance.

Kallis had made 86 from 110 balls across three hours and was out with three runs needed. It is one of the more brutal things a scorecard can record about a batsman: he did everything required of him and was dismissed close enough to the end that nobody remembers he was there.

Five thousand two hundred and twenty

The scorecard carries a line that most people who can recite the four wickets have never seen: Official Attendance: 5,220.

A World Cup Super Eights match at the Providence Stadium in Guyana, containing the only four-in-four in the history of one-day international cricket, was watched by a crowd smaller than a county fixture. The 2007 tournament had priced its tickets and scheduled its matches into empty grounds across the Caribbean, and this is the number that shows what it cost.

What repetition removes

Three things are true about the sequence and only one of them survives in the telling.

It was not one over. The fall of wickets puts it at 44.5, 44.6, then 46.1 and 46.2, with a whole over by someone else in between. It did not win the match. Sri Lanka lost. And almost nobody saw it happen.

What is left is the headline, four in four, and the headline is the only part most people could now tell you. A story told often enough sheds everything that complicates it, until what remains is the part that fits in a sentence.

••••••

No. 2 in The Over That Turned It, a series of 2.

TomorrowThirty-six from one over, eighteen at the end