South Africa were nearly 5,000 miles from home when they faced West Indies in Ahmedabad in the T20 World Cup on Thursday, yet the surface, and their growing familiarity with it, felt anything but foreign.
As soon as you walked into the Narendra Modi Stadium for the T20 World Cup clash between South Africa and West Indies, you sensed the song “Zamina-mina, hé-hé, Waka, waka, hé-hé” had become a refrain for the evening. This was not India’s match, yet it felt very much so. After India’s heavy defeat to South Africa and the West Indies’ win over Zimbabwe in the Super Eights, the permutations were simple: For India to remain alive, the West Indies had to lose.
The stands reflected the understanding. The stadium’s orange seats still bear the memories of 2023, when blue dissolved into silence on this very ground during the ODI World Cup final. This time, yellow was the common theme among the majority of the 28,422 in attendance.
South Africa won the toss and chose to bowl. West Indies began briskly, scoring 29 in two overs, as the stands fell silent. But South Africa bounced back, bowling the hard lengths consistently. Shai Hope managed a thin edge on a shorter delivery. Brandon King edged flashing outside off. Shimron Hetmyer top-edged a pull, hurried by bounce. Roston Chase was beaten by height before dragging on.
At 52-4 after the powerplay, the West Indies were caught between aggression and collapse. South Africa, on the other hand, impressed, bowling six deliveries in that 8-to-10-metre range that accounted for four wickets in that phase. There was no dramatic swing or seam movement on offer, but the ball held fractionally before climbing a touch steeper than expected.
On a red-soil pitch, where the game was being played, that early tackiness can be deceptive. Pace is reduced just enough to disrupt timing, yet the firmness underneath still produces bounce from back of length. Batters committing to horizontal shots, thus, must be on alert.
As the innings progressed, the surface eased. When Jason Holder and Romario Shepherd came together at 83-7, batting looked simpler. Shepherd later described it as a “very, very good wicket to bat on” as their record partnership rebuilt the innings. The late acceleration, including the assault on Marco Jansen in the 17th over, lifted the West Indies to 176. It felt competitive.
But the chase was anticlimactic. South Africa’s openers added 95 in 56 balls, and that was that. The target was eventually reached in 16.1 overs, and the contrast between the two innings became the talking point at the end of the game.
Super 8 - Match 7, West Indies vs South Africa
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After the game, skipper Aiden Markram explained the reading of the surface: “It was a little bit stoppy and with that extra bounce, new ball, a little bit of nip, we wanted to keep really trying to bowl good lengths and with a lot of energy on it.” He went on to describe how the toss played a crucial role in the match outcome: “We impressed with our performance in the powerplay. There was a bit of advantage with the steep bounce: I think it came from that tackiness that I mentioned. We got on the right side of the toss, fortunately, but the guys still had to get the ball in the right areas.”
The statement carried layers. First, the conditions themselves were not foreign to South Africa. Ahmedabad, particularly a red-soil pitch, can be firm and responsive to pace. When bowlers hit a hard length, the ball does not always skid on at a comfortable height. It can climb sharply, striking higher on the bat. Early in the innings, there can also be a slight hold in the surface before it evens out. That mix of bounce and brief tackiness is not identical to venues like Johannesburg or Centurion: it is closer in character to South African conditions than to the flatter, lower-bounce surfaces seen elsewhere in India. For an attack built around hitting the deck and extracting lift, the conditions here were familiar.
His counterpart, Hope, acknowledged the same: “I felt this was a very good surface actually, kind of reminded me of a South African surface and maybe some of these surfaces that we played on the last series that we played against them.”
Second, there was familiarity. This was South Africa’s fifth match out of their six of the tournament at this ground. It was not necessarily all on the same strip, and with 11 pitches at the venue, a mix of red and black soil, no two surfaces behave exactly alike. Some grip a little more. Some settle faster. Some offer a sharper bounce under lights. Keshav Maharaj had pointed out that the pitches here had varied across games, and that is true.
But familiarity at a venue is not about knowing one specific strip. It is about understanding how the ground tends to play. How the wickets behave in the first few overs. How long does it take for the surface to ease? When does dew usually arrive, and what does it do to the outfield? What the field dimensions are; how floodlights affect the game; what the atmosphere is with the crowd around; or if the weather will play a role. Even if the pitch changes, those patterns remain.
Markram conceded that advantage: “Yeah, we've been fortunate to play here for sure. We sensed it was tacky up front; it was tacky in the previous day game that we played here [against Afghanistan], and obviously, that affects the toss and how you operate in the power play, so that familiarity helps. I think the guys get comfortable with conditions and knowing what to expect. “
The West Indies, by contrast, arrived without that exposure. Their previous matches had been in Mumbai and Kolkata, where the bounce is more consistent. In Ahmedabad, especially on red soil, the back-of-a-length can climb more steeply, which proved to be the game-changer in the end.
Therein lay the subtle advantage. With the pitch sitting closer to South Africa’s natural style of play than to the West Indies’, and with five matches already played at the venue, it was not home in any conventional sense for the Proteas, yet it bore familiar markers. A subtle form of “home advantage”, shaped not by geography, but by recognition and repetition.
The same ground, though, carries different emotional associations for India. It was here that their unbeaten 2023 ODI World Cup dreams came crashing down, in tears and a never-can-be-fixed heartbreak. A few days ago, Ahmedabad was also the venue that handed India another massive defeat - just the second for the team in their last three ICC events, putting their journey ahead in the T20 World Cup in jeopardy.
But on Thursday, without India even stepping onto the field, the same venue shaped their fate differently. On a day when yellow broke up the orange in the stands, the ground that once signified unified sorrow offered something gentler. Not celebration, not redemption, but quiet relief.
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