Good evening friends, I hope you’ve had a good Monday! We were back to business as usual at Mallinsons Brewing Company after the weekends shenanigans, so back to the exciting cricket!
The World Cup was back in New York today for just the 1 game, Bangladesh Vs South Africa. The Tigers and the Proteas are amongst the most mercurial teams in world cricket. Bangladesh have been unplayable at home, especially in the test format and are still capable of pulling off moments of magic. Similarly, South Africa look unstoppable at times, sweeping all before them, until all over a sudden they don’t! So in a fixture like this, anything could happen!
South Africa have played 3 games so far and won 3 but they have looked very wobbly. SA kicked off the competition against Sri Lanka and despite losing their top 5 betters for around 30 runs, did enough to get the competition off with a win. Then on Saturday they faced their perennial bogey team The Netherlands and looked for all money like they would be double Dutch. Again however, they dug deep enough to get over the line. Today, well frankly they’d lost the game short of the fat umpire singing.
The Proteas won the toss and elected to bat, the strips at New York have tended to get worse as the match progresses so I can understand that decision. However when SA were 4 wickets down inside the power play, well I can’t imagine their minds were on a celebratory Castle lager! The powerful Heinrich Klaasen put up a good defence scoring a well measured 46 but even that only got SA to a underwhelming 113.
Bangladesh’s bowlers restricted the infamously big hitting Proteas well and the Tigers are a team with a wealth of experience. Shakib Al Hasan for example skippered BNG for years and has the distinction of being the only player to appear in every T20 World Cup. Make no mistake, even against the might of SA, Bangladesh should have won this game………but they didn’t. The Tigers batters got bogged down by an admittedly tricky pitch at the Nassau County International Cricket Stadium and finished the game on 109.
The question I posed at the top of this blog was, Are South Africa Struggling or hustling? There are 3 major things that really contribute to winning cricket tournaments, skill, form and momentum. SA have the skill, there is no doubt about that, they have a roll call of players that could be airlifted into any team anywhere. Then when it comes to form, the trick is to the hit it at the right moment. What you don’t want to do is be unstoppable in the early stages of a competition and then when it really matters, such as the knock out rounds, have it drop away. Very often with form comes momentum, a quality team, winning games can be very hard to stop, although as India discovered in the ODI World Cup last year, not impossible. My analysis. South Africa are currently not playing well but still managing to win games, those victories, however tenuous will build momentum and victories plus momentum will only help with the players form. SA might accidentally be getting this exactly right……..watch this space!
That’s it for today fellow travellers, tomorrow is another headline day with Pakistan taking on Canada, I can’t wait!
Until then,
All the best,
Nick
All The Cricket 
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