At last some ICC nail-biting of the right kind. It may have taken two out-of-sorts teams and a weekend to complete but yesterday the Champions Trophy could celebrate a tight finish as the West Indies middle order outmanoeuvred the South African bowlers with only seven balls to spare.
And Brian Lara, who had sloped off after Saturday night's press conference like a man so bored with the whole thing he could barely be bothered to pick up his feet, could eat his Sunday lunch to shouts of "We love you Lara" echoing round The Oval. His prize is a semi-final against Pakistan at the Rose Bowl on Wednesday.
Lara could congratulate himself on forging some West Indian steel in his batting partners as his improving one-day side first restricted South Africa's final total after a century-opening partnership and then engineered another successful run-chase.
"We showed a lot of character," he said afterwards. "We won the crucial parts of the game. Myself and [Ramnaresh] Sarwan laid the foundations. We consolidated and didn't worry about the run-rate and we saw [Ricardo] Powell and Chanderpaul win it in style."
It was a calm batting performance by West Indies, who had refused to panic after Shaun Pollock took two early wickets and Lara was nearly run out attempting his first run.
They struggled to move the ball off a sluggish square, one which Lara later criticised as "not conducive to proper shots". And with 25 overs gone, only 87 on the board and Chris Gayle and Wavell Hinds back in the pavilion, the chances of West Indies progressing to the semi-finals looked slim.
But they had consolidated deceptively well. Lara, who hit five familiar classy boundaries, charged Nicky Bojé and was bowled for 49 but Sarwan, who had crawled to double figures in 38 balls, at last found his timing and was soon hitting two huge sixes on his way to 75.
Chanderpaul seemed in command from the moment he walked in and Powell did all that he was there for, scoring two identical sixes off two identical consecutive balls as Shaun Pollock's last over went for 19.
With the total suddenly down to less than a run a ball, West Indies eased themselves to a victory celebrated with much tooting and hooting.
For South Africa it was the end of a miserable English autumn mini-break that had failed to halt their one-day rot. On Saturday they had been roared on all the way by a largely pro-South African crowd who boozily revelled in Herschelle Gibbs's first century since the 2003 World Cup but the Sunday-morning Oval was pure maroon and it seemed to sap their confidence.
Even a finger-pointing pep-talk by the towering figure of Graeme Smith at a crucial point of the match as Chanderpaul got treatment for cramp could not produce any magic formula at the end.
Smith, who looked unfamiliarly ill at ease after the game, fiddling with his microphone and looking at the ground, gave the performance the best gloss he could.
"I thought we were in control all the time, we didn't rush, we thought about what we needed to do. I think you have to give credit to Sarwan and Lara, who were under a lot of pressure, and they set up the game for someone like Powell, who came off in one over and it was game set and match. I can't question the way we performed in the field."
And so South Africa troop home to a month off the international whirlwind and some soul-searching.