This time, they did not choke. What will hurt Graeme Smith most is the fact that they did not even get close enough to Pakistan — the point from which choking becomes an issue.

“Every time we lose an important game like this, the word is going to be thrown around,” Smith said when, a nervous 15 minutes into the press conference, he was finally asked if they choked. “It’s natural if we didn’t win today people were going to raise that comment.”

So, did he think they choked? “This is a knock-out tournament from the word go. Maybe the other teams choked in the Super Eights stage. From our perspective, we could have not got to the semi-final, but we played great cricket and got here and we were just beaten by a better team on the day. I’m very proud of the way the guys played right through the tournament. We were beaten and that’s the sad reality,” Smith said.

The South Africans had done well to restrict Pakistan to 149, for at one time during the match, when Afridi was hitting out, 170 looked very much possible. But their batting, apart from Jacques Kallis, never really got going. “He (Kallis) really got us into a strong position. I don’t think we batted really well around him. He was ahead of the game and the guys coming in never really kicked on.”

MASSIVE STEPS

Disconsolate as he was with the defeat, Smith insisted he was happy with how far the team had come over the last couple of years. “There are a lot of things we did that we hadn’t done before we started this season. We won in England, we won in Australia. The team took massive steps over the last couple of years.”

... contd.