Quinton de Kock scored a superlative century as South Africa kept their one-day series with England alive courtesy of a seven-wicket triumph in Centurion.
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Yet they made light of their target, with an opening stand of 239 in 36.5 overs between de Kock and Hashim Amla racing them to victory with seven wickets and 22 deliveries remaining.
With England having won the first two games in the five-match series, South Africa required a win to sustain their hopes of avoiding their first double defeat – defeat in the Test and ODI sections of a tour – at home for 14 years.
The runs continued to come steadily as the opening pair breezed ahead of the rate, England’s bowling attack providing little resistance as De Kock notched his 10th ODI century.
A 22nd ODI ton moved Amla to joint-seventh on the all-time list of century-makers alongside Chris Gayle, Tillakaratne Dilshan and Sourav Ganguly.
Alex Hales and Root got going, and added 125 runs for the second wicket in 123 balls, after Jason Roy had fallen for 20.
That would be another notable success for Trevor Bayliss, England’s Australian coach, who added success in the Test series here to last summer’s surprise Ashes victory against his homeland.
Root survived a half-chance on 44, De Kock just unable to collect a diving caught-behind away to his right as the ball died from an edge at David Wiese.
To put that into perspective, former Proteas captain and fellow opener Graeme Smith finished his career with 10 ODI hundreds in the 197 matches he played for South Africa.
Du Plessis got the job done though, hitting Stokes for a six off one ball to level the scores, before tucking one neatly into the legside to finish the job off.
England’s most consistent performer this summer took his exploits from the test arena into the ODIs, profiting with his second century on tour and his sixth score over 50 in 11 innings across both formats. “The ball didn’t swing early on so we had to go back to hitting our lengths, and we didn’t do that well enough to create pressure”. When the Amla and De Kock show is in full swing, the Proteas will nearly always come out on top. We had a bit of urgency and hunger in the field.
There were hiccups along the way, with Kagiso Rabada taking two wickets in four balls in the 27th over to dismiss Hales and Jos Buttler, the hero of England’s first two wins in the series first ball following a stunning catch by JP Duminy at leg gully.
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Moeen Ali (3) then clocked Morkel (1-63) into the deep and Abbott (2-50) picked up the scalps of Stokes and Chris Jordan (3) in successive balls, though Adil Rashid (13no from 7) and David Willey (13no from 8) lifted the tourists above 300 by tonking a maximum apiece. We do not know what our strongest side is yet but we are in a hell of a place to go into that World T20.
