You can live a whole life in a Super Over.
Cricketing organisations plan for years for global events such as this T20 World Cup. Administrators put down infrastructure that can take years to build and perhaps decades to fund. Stadiums, nets, swimming pools, gyms, treatment rooms, brain centres where they pore over footage and analysis. By 2030, we want to be here. By 2035, these facilities should be available. At the team level, players are identified, groomed for their roles, upskilled, exposed to conditions, battle-hardened in specially-organised bilateral tours, their workloads and injuries managed with input from consultants, all of the above conforming to spreadsheets produced by rank-and-file, overseen by managers, signed off by cricket directors.
These monumental multi-year efforts from multitudes of actors are all pulling in one direction: giving their teams a shot at glory. And ask pretty much any World Cup winner, and they'll tell you the same thing, that there's nothing in the sporting world that measures up to World Cup glory. It transforms lives, magics up new livelihoods, expands cricketing economies - they are the biggest validation for all these efforts.
By the time South Africa vs Afghanistan had arrived at the game's first Super Over, 39.4 overs of effort (Afghanistan were all out with two balls remaining) had already been expended that day. This being this tournament's group of death, and with New Zealand rocking an excellent net run rate already, there was the sense that this is the fixture that largely decides which of these teams qualifies for the Super Eights.
So into the Super Over were funnelled mountainloads of cricketing ambition - a group exit from the biggest event this year an unacceptable outcome to both teams. Every defining moment in a World Cup is bursting with this weight, but in a Super Over - which is designed to be dramatic - all of the game's aspirations are narrowed into a single spear tip.
You can live a whole life on the edge of this blade. Ask Fazalhaq Farooqi, who had failed to dive to make his ground at the end of Afghanistan's regular-time innings, and gave up the centimetres of ground which may cost them a Super Eights position. In the Super Over, he was required to brush off a running mistake, start again, and rewire himself to produce an entirely different set of skills and awareness as a death bowler.
Ask Kagiso Rabada, the most experienced quick in the game, who started the final over of regular play with a no-ball that cost him a wicket, then a wide, then soon conceded a six, then pulled himself together to complete the run out that tied the match, then couldn't quite fling the ball back infield when he took a catch at the boundary in the first Super Over, but did well enough to concede only a four rather than a six, which eventually was of serious significance.
Then Farooqi, later, was required to defend 18, which as Super Over bowling assignments go, feels like one in which the odds are in your favour. He conceded a six second ball, took a wicket off his third with a slower-ball bouncer, bowled a spectacular yorker fifth ball to leave South Africa needing seven to win off the last delivery, then fired through a shin-high full toss that Tristan Stubbs muscled over long off to tip the game into its second Super Over.
Seam bowling coaches anywhere will tell you that if you are going to get a yorker wrong, bowl a low full toss rather than a half volley. Farooqi's full toss just wasn't quite low enough - ten centimetres further south, and Stubbs might have struggled … caught at long on, Farooqi tears around the field, Afghanistan celebrate.
All that years-long macro planning and mobilisation of efforts at scale are in the end given haunting meaning by what happens on the molecular level in the speartip of competition. How much must Martin Guptill wonder, for instance about the speed and direction of the throw from the outfield in that shimmering 2019 World Cup final, which hit the diving Ben Stokes' bat at exactly the right velocity and angle to send the ball screaming to the unprotected boundary behind the wicketkeeper? How much of his life will he spend wondering?
Will Farooqi wish he'd bowled a slower one to Stubbs instead? Will Azmatullah Omarzai fret over his own full toss, which David Miller clobbered over deep midwicket off the fourth ball of the second Super Over? Will Rahmanullah Gurbaz wish he had shuffled to the off side to confound Keshav Maharaj's plan to go full and wide with the last ball of the match, which is the cricketing act that finally split the teams in this epic?
South Africa and Afghanistan are teams with vastly different circumstances, but yet carry the hopes of so many. And yet to spot the difference between them, on a warm afternoon in one of cricket's most colossal stadiums, you needed the electron microscope of two Super Overs.
Super Overs are magnetic because they pit a bowler against two batters, and strips a contest down to vital component parts. But there is another kind of tension here. The vast machinations of human planning and organisation come up against the human frailty that exists in these moments. You can live a whole life in a Super Over, and you can also spend the rest of yours wondering. In this game, we got two.