Patil played in the game, without much success with the bat (out for a single to Kevin Curran), and being on the receiving end of some ‘banter’ which would certainly not be acceptable today (& shouldn’t have been then) from South Africans and Zimbabweans there to support the underdogs.

For much of the Zimbabwe innings he was fielding on the boundary right in front of my sister and I & so we were in a good position to see that for some r?eason a few of the Zimbabwe supporters started shouting at him that he was a ‘Chapati�eater. Having put up with this for a while, Patil turned to them and replied ‘Actually I prefer steak� Whether this was actually true or not, it stopped that particular insult stone dead.

I’d entered the game as a neutral supporting the underdog – by the end I was fully supporting India, partly due to Kapil’s fantastic innings, but also to the contrast in behaviour between the rival supporters.