South Africa's 2024 T20 World Cup Final

For twenty-six years South Africa's men had not reached the final of a global tournament. They had lost semi-finals in almost every way it is possible to lose one, and the failure had acquired a name and a folklore of its own. On 29 June 2024 they walked out at Kensington Oval in Bridgetown having won eight matches in a row, needing to chase 177 to end all of it, and lost by seven runs.

The tournament had been the opposite of a procession. South Africa won their group with two victories that could each have gone the other way in the last over, then won a Super Eight match by seven runs and another with a six from an injured all-rounder, then destroyed Afghanistan in the semi-final. Aiden Markram captained. Temba Bavuma, who leads in the other two formats, was not in the side.

By the middle of the eighteenth over of the final, with Heinrich Klaasen hitting a fifty off 27 balls and 30 needed from 30 balls, South Africa were the likely winners of the match and of a first men's world title. Then India bowled four overs that conceded eighteen runs and took four wickets, and it was over.

Eight wins, and how narrow most of them were

South Africa's route to the final is the least remembered part of the story, which is odd, because it was one of the strangest unbeaten runs in the tournament's history. They won every match, and the aggregate margin of the close ones was almost nothing.

Stage	Opponent	Margin
Group D	Sri Lanka	Comfortable win, Sri Lanka bowled out for 77
Group D	Netherlands	Won
Group D	Bangladesh	4 runs
Group D	Nepal	1 run
Super Eight	United States	18 runs
Super Eight	England	7 runs
Super Eight	West Indies	3 wickets, rain-revised target
Semi-final	Afghanistan	9 wickets, Afghanistan out for 56

The Nepal match in Kingstown was won by a single run defending 115. The Bangladesh match was won by four runs defending 113. The West Indies match in Antigua was interrupted by rain, the target cut to 123 in 17 overs under the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method, and settled by Marco Jansen hitting a six in the final over while carrying an injury; that result knocked the hosts out.

The semi-final at Tarouba in Trinidad was the exception and it was brutal. Afghanistan were bowled out for 56 and South Africa knocked off the runs for the loss of one wicket with more than eleven overs unused. It was the first time a South African men's side had won a knockout match at a global tournament to reach a final, and it was the easiest match they played all month.

What came before it

South Africa had played in every edition of the men's T20 World Cup since it began and had never gone past a semi-final. The pattern is worth laying out, because it shows how unusual the 2024 run was rather than how overdue it had become.

Edition	Host	Stage reached	Captain
2007	South Africa	Super Eight	Graeme Smith
2009	England	Semi-final	Graeme Smith
2010	West Indies	Super Eight	Graeme Smith
2012	Sri Lanka	Super Eight	AB de Villiers
2014	Bangladesh	Semi-final	Faf du Plessis
2016	India	Super 10	Faf du Plessis
2021	Oman and UAE	Super 12	Temba Bavuma
2022	Australia	Super 12	Temba Bavuma
2024	USA and West Indies	Runners-up	Aiden Markram

Two of those exits are worth singling out. In 2007 South Africa hosted the first edition and did not reach the last four. In 2021 they won four of their five group matches and went out on net run rate, which is a specific and modern kind of elimination: nothing was lost in a knockout, because there was no knockout to lose.

By 2024 the side's white-ball reputation rested largely on those margins rather than on collapses. That is the context in which a final lost by seven runs registered as confirmation of an old story instead of a departure from it.

Bridgetown, and a pitch nobody quite read

India won the toss and batted. Kensington Oval had produced low-scoring cricket through the tournament, and 176 for 7 turned out to be the highest total made in a men's T20 World Cup final, which says as much about the format's history of tight finals as about the surface.

South Africa's bowling was disciplined rather than dominant. Keshav Maharaj took two for 23 in three overs, Anrich Nortje two for 26 in four. Marco Jansen went for 49 in his four, which in a match decided by seven runs is the sort of figure that gets revisited for years.

Kohli batting against his own instinct

Virat Kohli made 76 from 59 balls, hit six fours and two sixes and was named player of the match, and the innings has an unusual shape for a T20 final. India lost early wickets, Kohli stopped trying to score at the tempo the format demands, and rebuilt: 72 with Axar Patel, who made 47 from 31 with four sixes, and then 57 with Shivam Dube.

Kohli was out in the eighteenth over. For a chasing side that pattern is normally good news, because a slow anchor innings usually means a total below par. Here it meant that India had a total on a pitch where the ball was not coming through evenly, and 177 was worth more than it looked.

Twenty-seven balls from Klaasen

South Africa lost two wickets early and then recovered through Quinton de Kock, who made 39 from 31, and Tristan Stubbs, who made 31 from 21 in a stand of 58. That took the chase to a position from which a settled middle order simply had to finish it.

Then Heinrich Klaasen did what Klaasen does. He made 52 from 27 balls with five sixes, and for a period in the middle of the innings the required rate stopped being a problem at all. South Africa reached the point of needing 30 runs from the last 30 balls with wickets in hand and the best finisher in the side still to bat.

There is no version of that position which is not winning. Sides chase 30 from 30 in T20 cricket without incident several times a week. What happened next is the reason the match is remembered.

The last five overs

India's bowling in the final four overs conceded eighteen runs and took four wickets. Hardik Pandya finished with three for 20 from three overs, Jasprit Bumrah two for 18 from four, Arshdeep Singh two for 20 from four.

Klaasen was dismissed and the innings went quiet immediately. Bumrah's overs at the end of a T20 innings are the hardest to score off in the world and he bowled them exactly as required. Pandya's variations took the pace off and the ball stopped going where South Africa's batters expected it to. There was no single collapse ball and no controversy about a rule; there was a sequence of good deliveries and a batting side that could not get one away.

The moment that ended it involved David Miller, who hit the ball high and long towards the boundary in the last over. Suryakumar Yadav caught it near the rope, released the ball as he went over the line, stepped back inside and completed the catch. It was checked, replayed from several angles and given out; a period of social-media argument about whether his boot had touched the cushion was settled by footage from a different camera. South Africa finished on 169 for 8.

The record entries

A handful of marks came out of the match, and they are worth separating from the narrative because several of them are ambiguous rather than flattering to either side.

• India's 176 for 7 is the highest total made in a men's T20 World Cup final, which is a comment on how low-scoring the format's finals have been rather than on the innings.
• India became the first side to win a men's T20 World Cup without losing a match. South Africa were the other unbeaten team going into the final, so one of the two records was always going to be set that day.
• The attendance at Kensington Oval was around 28,000.
• The prize money split gave the winners roughly 2.45 million US dollars and the runners-up about 1.28 million.
• South Africa's overall men's T20 World Cup record across all editions runs at rather more wins than losses, which is the statistic that sits least comfortably with the reputation.

What the defeat did and did not change

The immediate reading was that this was another entry in the same file: the 1999 tie at Edgbaston, Eden Park in 2015, and now a final lost from a winning position. The pattern across all of South Africa's knockout cricket is traced in the guide to their World Cup knockout history.

The more interesting reading is what the tournament proved South Africa could do. They had never before won a knockout match to reach a global final. The 2024 side did, and it did so with a captain who was not the first-choice leader, a bowling attack that defended totals of 113 and 115, and a middle order that won matches by single-figure margins repeatedly rather than once. Winning ugly eight times is not the profile of a side that freezes.

The confirmation came within a year. In June 2025, at Lord's, South Africa beat Australia by five wickets to win the World Test Championship — Aiden Markram making 136 in the chase, Kagiso Rabada taking five in the first innings and Temba Bavuma making 66 as captain. It was South Africa's first ICC title since 1998. Whether the 2024 defeat contributed anything to that is unprovable, but the personnel overlapped heavily and the argument that this group could not win a knockout stopped being available.

The women's side had already been making the same point in a harsher form. South Africa's women reached the T20 World Cup final in 2023, losing to Australia by 19 runs at Newlands in front of a home crowd, and reached it again in 2024. Two finals in two years, both lost, is covered in the guide to the Proteas women's team.

The fixture it happened against

That the final was against India gave it an extra weight in both countries. India had not won a global trophy in thirteen years and had lost the 50-over final on home soil eight months earlier; the win prompted the T20 retirements of Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Ravindra Jadeja on the outfield. From the South African side, losing a first final to India specifically fed into a fixture that has been lopsided for three decades, described in the guide to the South Africa and India rivalry.

The wider tournament context — how the T20 World Cup has expanded, and how its knockout structure works — is in the guide to the T20 World Cup. Career figures for the players named here sit in the player index, and the rest of the South African game is on the cricket in South Africa hub.

Sources and method

This page rests on the ICC's official match records and reports for the 2024 men's T20 World Cup, published scorecards for each South African fixture in the tournament, contemporary reporting from the BBC and other outlets for the passage of play in the final overs, and the ICC's own account of the third-umpire review of the Suryakumar Yadav catch. The World Test Championship final detail is taken from ICC records of that match. Where a phase of play is described rather than enumerated ball by ball, that is because the published sources support the description and not a finer breakdown. No figure here is computed from our own datasets, and the assessments of what the tournament proved are offered as argument.