A hit! A palpable hit!

It's been one of those days with four seasons the Cape is famous for: humid and wet early on, then a brisk wintry breeze bringing out the pullovers, then a leisurely clearing of the skies and finally a sizzling afternoon. And meanwhile a thousand miles away, the Aussies and South Africans batted, and batted, and batted and ... ended up rewriting Wisden in providing the greatest game of one-day cricket ever seen anywhere, an epic of Homeric glory.

Surely the Australians must have thought a world record score of 434 would result in their grinding us into the dust. But seemingly captain "Biff" Smith ( a team nickname inspired by his infeasibly large jaw) had other ideas. SA had been widely tipped by the Aussies to "choke", or lose their bottle. But it was the visitors who ended up with the big swallow. They lost to a new world record score of 437 reached with the second last ball of the final over. If you wrote it as fiction it would be scoffed at.

It is occasions like this that turn cricket into great theatre. Or perhaps a movie. Mark Boucher struck the winning runs and was asked how he felt: "I want to get the DVD," he replied. Of course. Cricketers' favourite movies tend to be either Rocky in Sly's various periods, or Braveheart -- which was, oddly, directed and starred in by an Aussie. Mission Impossible would be the appropriate choice here.