South Africa bring their A game to Gqeberha

More than two hours before the first ball would be bowled in the second men's T20I between South Africa and India on Sunday, St George's Park's gates remained firmly shut to civilians. But already around a thousand or so ticket-touting fans had lined up at the turnstiles.

Most were wrapped up against the chill of the thin easterly breeze; the damp, win-the-toss-and-field wind that comes off the Indian Ocean and makes the ball swing at this ground. Above, grey ruled with impunity. But, unlike in Durban on Friday, the clouds were high and docile.

From inside the home of cricket - the first Test played in South Africa, and the first outside Australia and England, was at St George's Park in March 1889 - came the strains of Jana Gana Mana. It was played once, twice, thrice. So was South Africa's unnamed composite national anthem. Thereby hangs what media muppets, social and mainstream, had tried to turn into a controversy. Happily, they failed.

When India's anthem was played at Kingsmead, the recorded audio cut out twice, and resumed twice. Suryakumar Kumar and his team looked bemused, but they did the sensible thing and kept singing; with and without accompaniment. After all, it wasn't as if they needed help. In an attempt to make amends for any perceived slight, the anthem was played in full again. Sensibly, again, the players sang once more. South Africa's anthem passed free of glitches.

Kingsmead confirmed to Cricbuzz that they had not received a complaint from the Indians. Instead, SuperSport sources said, the visitors had a quiet word with the broadcaster. The playing of the anthems is not, of course, SuperSport's responsibility.

And there this unremarkable matter might have died an unnoticed death and been buried in an unlabelled online wrinkle. It did and it was, save for a smattering of headlines in India claiming the anthem had been "disrespected", that the start of the match had been "overshadowed", and that India's "furious" supporters deemed this "unacceptable". India fans who do feel this way will be considered shockingly immature by their peers, and rightly so.

How much of the outrage was fact and how much faux can't be known, but the people who took offence probably argue that politics and sport don't mix. Closer to the truth is that notions of patriotism and sport shouldn't be mixed. Why is international sport encumbered with the irrelevant, artificial stuffiness of national anthems? Even so, there was reason for St George's Park to make doubly and triply sure that it brought its anthem A game on Sunday. Hence the repetitions in the hours before the match.

The gates were still closed and the anthems still playing when Ashwell Prince, who is commentating on the series, sidled past the back of the crowd. Prince was born and raised in what was then called Port Elizabeth - now Gqeberha - and is still lazily referred to as PE. It was at St George's Park that he scored the first of his 45 first-class centuries: an undefeated 125 that took Eastern Province B to a seven-wicket win over Natal B in November 1996.

The crowd noticed Prince's presence and a whisper of "Ashy P is in the house" rattled through the ranks. So there was no escaping the thronging selfie-hunters, and Prince duly and patiently obliged. "Still big in PE," someone quipped at him. "Only big in PE," he retorted gamely. The last man in the scrum eagerly held up his phone only to discover the lens was the wrong way around. Prince waited for him to sort it out, and gently chided in Afrikaans: "Heeltyd gewag, maar die camera is reversed!" (You've waited all this time, but the camera is reversed!).

Just more than two hours later, after a drizzle had abated, the anthems had been flawlessly delivered, and as the brass band were warbling through Eddy Grant's "Gimme Hope Jo'anna", Marco Jansen stood at the top of his run ready to start the match from the St George's Park Drive End. At the Duckpond End, Sanju Samson, the king of Kingsmead on Friday for his 50-ball 107, was coiled into a crouch.

Jansen's third delivery swung wickedly through the air, seamed after pitching, and nailed the top of leg stump. It was the first time in three T20I innings that Samson had not hit a century, and the first time in all of India's 240 T20Is that they had lost their first wicket without a run on the board.

There were 6,740 pairs of eyes in the stands and on the grass banks at that moment. They blinked, and when 8,146 pairs of eyes opened in the 15th, India were 87 for 6. Hardik Pandya, dropped twice in the 20th, batted in three of the four biggest stands of the innings for his 45-ball 39 not out. Of the rest, only Tilak Varma and Axar Patel reached 20. No-one's strike rate touched 130.

On Friday, Samson struck at 214 and Varma at 183.33. Jansen's 6.00 was South Africa's only economy rate under eight, and four of the seven bowlers were in double figures. But not every pitch is going to be bespoke for T20 cricket, like Kingsmead's was, with an outfield to match.

There was nothing wrong with the St George's Park surface, but recent rain had juiced it for seam bowlers. The grass on it was noticeably green and the bounce fairly boomed.

When the innings ended, with India having wobbled to 124 for 6, the 8,231 present no doubt thought South Africa had set themselves up for a simple victory. Never in the 87 T20Is in which they had fielded first for a full 20 overs had they failed to reach a target as low as Sunday's. Only once in the 84 games they have won batting first had India defended a total as low in a full innings, when they held Pakistan to a reply of 113 for 7 after being dismissed for 119 in Nassau County in the T20 World Cup in June this year.

Why the focus on the spectator figures? There was a clue in the Springbok shirts and caps many in the crowd wore. Twenty minutes after India's innings ended, the Boks kicked off against Scotland in Edinburgh. Millions of pairs of eyes would turn to them. Would the few thousand eyes gathered at St George's Park leave en masse?

No. They had watched from afar as South Africa lost six of their last seven T20Is, including the World Cup final by seven runs against the same opponents in Barbados in June. They had last seen their team up close and personal almost a year ago in an ODI, also against India. Since then they had seen their SA20 team, Sunrisers Eastern Cape, add a second title to their 2023 triumph. This crowd were going nowhere.

They might have wondered whether they had made the right decision when South Africa shambled to 66 for 6 in the 13th. Varun Chakaravarthy bowled with guile and grace to rip out five of those wickets for 17, improving on the 3 for 25 he took in Durban as his career-best performance. When Ravi Bishnoi's googly cleanbowled Andile Simelane, South Africa needed 40 off 26.

They were down to their last hope: Tristan Stubbs. Who would hold up the other end? Gerald Coetzee did a lot more than that. A lusty, ambitious player who celebrates his teammates' successes on the field almost as vociferously as he does his own, Coetzee gave himself licence to thrill; hitting two fours and a six - a handsome hoist over long-off off Arshdeep Singh - in his nine-ball 19 not out.

Stubbs did what Stubbs does: score runs in an outrageously energetic fashion. His 47 not out came off 41 balls, the last of them pulled for four off Arshdeep to settle the issue and take the series to the Highveld level at 1-1 with two games to play.

But that wasn't all Stubbs did. "It's my mom's birthday, so this is her celebration," he told a press conference. And it wasn't all about his mother, either: "I live here, and we're dying for live sport. The crowd come out when we do get games and they're really involved. You can really feel that they are here, in the SA20 and whenever the Proteas are here. The atmosphere is always amazing."

Like it was on Sunday. To the 8,042 who stayed until the end, take a bow.