McCullum's Cinderella moment

With straight boundaries just 40 metres long, it was not supposed to take half an innings for a ball to find its way over them but that's how long it took. When New Zealand introduced their fifth bowler, Grant Elliott, Rilee Rossouw saw the opportunity to cash in and lofted a length ball straight back over the bowler's head and over the sightscreen to breach the Eden Park boundaries. They are supposed to be breached.

'Two toes, amazing feat,' read the headline of the New Zealand Herald after Martin Guptill's double-hundred in the quarter-final. They can add amazing hands to that now. Guptill was stationed at backward point when Rossouw tried to punch Corey Anderson away but ended up catching the ball with the shoulder of his bat instead. The ball threatened to fly over Guptill but he leapt off his feet, stuck out his right hand and reached high to cling on with jus a few fingers and give New Zealand the breakthrough they so desperately needed.

AB de Villiers does not give opposition teams too many chances to dismiss him but when he sunk his bat into a Anderson delivery, he did. De Villiers could not resist the width and smacked the ball to short cover. Kane Williamson had to reach to his left and got to the ball, only for it to burst through his hands. De Villiers was on 38 at the time and had faced 28 balls. Three deliveries later he crossed fifty. Six balls later he presented another chance off a top edge, which three fielders converged on and none called for. New Zealand never did get rid of de Villiers in this game, but Williamson will know he was the man who could have.

The captains promised there would be no sledging, pushing or shoving as this game would be played in the right spirit with all the talking done in action and neither was lying. De Villiers had done his bit and then Brendon McCullum did his, with just a hint of audacity. At the start of the fourth over of New Zealand's innings, he charged Dale Steyn, not just any bowler, Dale Steyn and hit him over his head, over the sighscreen for six. Against another batsmen, Steyn may have had a few things to say. To McCullum, he only smiled.

It's gloves that are usually said to come off when one combatant prepares to lay into the other, but as McCullum was about to trample all over South Africa in the mandatory Powerplay, maybe it was fitting that it was footwear he lost. He took a step forward after defending a short ball but when he slipped as he turned back to the crease, found that his boot had abandoned him. On his hands and knees, McCullum turned back and found it lying a metre-and-a-half down the track, in the developing rough.