Small little opening ceremony in progress at the moment.
Faf on the same page as Denny....win toss and bowl. The bowlers must capitalize and take 2 or 3 early wickets. Batting will be a bit easier in the second session.
SA has so far been better at chasing a target, than at setting one.
Nice one flash
You've always been spot on with your comments and picks.
D en, got to hand it to flash, he knows his stuff.
#proteafire #goproteas
Ngidi is going to be lethal on that wicket. On the downside there's Duminy and Pretorius......line and length is going to be critical.
Can't wait.
First wicket. Nice
Actually Chippo, See my below post to win toss and bowl made 2 days ago.
And oh, where's your prediction Budd y? I've yet to see you guys stepping into the breach
I think Ngidi is trying too hard and the batters are just using the speed on the ball to score runs.
Den, what doe this mean "I've yet to see you guys stepping into the breach "?
fact remains, flash is our local cricket powerhouse.
Not saying you are bad or anything... but flash is king.
Gooo pretorius.
well done son. He's pegged them back nicely.
Too many leg side balls by everyone.
Ngidi thinks he can move the ball more than he can. He needs to stay wider and force them to hit him on the up.
Pretorius, at his pace should be on the money. He ain't.
Duminy & Markram look tough to get away. Pitch bit two paced with the odd stopper.
Would be great to have Philander here.
No swing for anyone thus far.
We need some OZ consultants to help us extract reverse in the first over.
Dag Pruimedant.
Agreed on Philander.
SA need to score 312 to win...achievable yes, good bowling kept Eng from a cracker score.
oops ... Faf jou koos.
Red lights are flickering.
Amla left the field injured and is unlikely to return. Marlram and Du Plessis were out playing stupid.
Poor Quinton is the only one trying anything.
... and there goes Quinton. eina.
Duminy you fool.
That shot from the most experienced player in the side?
Such an anticlimactic tit he is .
Pretorius also out.
Wheels are off.
Haha
Soft wickets and silly shots.
Should have been an easy chase on a pitch that did nothing but sit up a few times.
And they're lucky England took their foot off the gas else they'd have been chasing 360.
Dreadful.
Looks like a short tournament.
Good...first loss out of the way.
Mozart
Instead of praising De Kock and Van der Dussen for their effort - they are added to the list of senior players who imploded.
So lets get his straight:-
* Amla's reactions are way too slow to play in decent matches. Like in the previous two WC's he imploded again yesterday.
* Both Du Pleessis and Duminy played extremely poor batting games and scored badly. There fielding was good though.
* On the whole Duminy proved yesterday he should not be in the squad - neither should Amla. They were traditional chokers in previoous WC's
* The bowlers should have done better - the commentators referred to them bowling the wrong length balls all the time.
* Why did Markram had a better economy rate than Duminy had and even lower than Tahit?
There is a lot of questions to be asked and the main one relates to the failure of Amla and Duminy. They are at the end of their careers.
I think that Markram started badly - but he has ample scope to improve and at least his fielding was very good. He has something the elderly chokers missed - he has youth on his side,
An extremely poor start - by a team who should do better, bar for the reputation selections - after all both choked in the previo us WC's as well..
Somehow I enjoy this hiding, because they deliberately choose to ignore AB.
Problem is De Villiers himself decided to opt out and insisted he is not going to be available.
AB is now playing financial cricket - he adds on to his rapidly expanding fortune. Wonder how that would last - for AB's benefit I hope it goes on for the next 3 years
In the recent IPL AB had the following record:-
Poor betting - circa 20%
Averege - circa 45%
Good - circa 35%
"Gooo pretorius.
well done son. He's pegged them back nicely"
Mike
I thought Ngidi was disappointing in his first five(nerves?) and I also think Faf erred in not having a gully fielder in the early overs. They really lacked another good quick, pretty sad how it panned out though with some below average batting on a flat wicket that had 350 at its mercy.
It was never nerves and total incompetence by key players and partly choking. Lets face facts - there are players in that squad that rarely played anything for near to six months and when they did play they mostly failed.
So what do we have in the batting line-up:-
* Amla failed badly
* De Kock - good performance
* Markram failed badly
* Du Plessis failed badly
* Van der Dussen - good performance
* Duminy failed badly
In other words 4 out of 6 batsmen FAILED BADLY, Whenever under such circumstances 2 batsmen made more than half the runs the whole team made together it tells a story where the real problems lie.
I would in the Bangla Desh game drop Amla - at least Miller may not be a total disaster. I hope Du Plessis and Markram will recover from the English game and show their real value - but think Duminy is another disastrous selection which is not much better than Amla was yesterday - but we will have to put up with one of them for the series.
How they got into the squad was mostly through media hype and total surrender to what should never be. The difference is the squad is too limited to allow for passengers and I am afraid they have too many passengers in the squad,
I think against major teams Amla and Duminy will always fail I give Faf and Markram a chance to recover from this major setback - the other two have NO chance of doing that, .
It's not as if I expected anything else from these losers.
We are a third world country, with third world sports teams, made up by enforced quotas and non merited selections.
We love drawing the elderly back into the mix.
Our cricket team doesn't have the attack to peg anyone back ... nor the batting to chase anything decent.
We are known across the globe as chokers and in all honesty, the result yesterday flattered us.
What an embarrassment. They should save us further humiliation by coming home immediately.
The new South Africa ... a shadow of it's former self ... across every spectrum.
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahaaa!!!
Great to see.
Despite what happened yesterday, our batting is not the problem.
The bowling is.
It's easy to look good in SA. Our wickets are bouncy and fast. In England, control is paramount.
The amount of balls that got played off of legs and hips in the first 15 overs was shocking. They totally wasted the brilliant start that Tahir afforded them.
Hardly any of the wickets SA took were down to good balls. Most were poor shots. One could argue that Root's dismissal was planned though.
Agreed Denny. The ball was sitting up and batters playing away from their bodie s.
Even before the first one squirted through gully there should have been a fielder there.
Just piss poor.
Plum
In a way you are correct - but the fact is the bowling was ineffective almost the whole game, I think that Rabada and Tahir is good enough to play on flat wickets - Rabada was the top bowler in the IPL and Tahir was also one of the top bowlers in that competition.
I still do not understand the field placing yesterday, Why have two players in the slips when there was very little chance of slip catches?
I think the captaincy was poor yesterday and I also think that the bowlers will learn to bowl better in future. Problem remains I think Steyn would be taken to the cleaners even when he returns from injury, He was ineffective against the Pakistani's when he did play in ODI's so that shows that he is likely to be a problem selection as well.
Mike
In T20 there is immediate pressure on the batsmen. You can't ignore a bowler as you must score off of every opportunity.
In ODIs you can happily score at 3-4 an over from a teams best two bowlers and milk the others. Still hitting well over 300.
That's the difference.
In T20s natural pressure gives you wickets. In tests you have time to build your bowling attack plans.
In ODIs you've got to be spot on and execute from the get go. You MUST make the batter play from ball one and a ball on the hips that allows rotation of strike is about as criminal as it gets.
Fact is that this pitch was sitting up and instead of Ngidi, Rabada and Pretorious bowling slightly shorter and at a fifth stump, they were send half volleys and leg side balls down.
They bowled as if it were a slow pitch with variable low bounce. That's when you target the stumps. It NOT that type of track.
Gibson was a bowler. Yesterday's performance was seriously lacking guidance.
I really like both Ngidi, and Rabada is going to overtake Steyn's record I'm sure, but yesterday was nice mix of shit planning, failure to adapt and poor execution.
Our batters are fine. They'll sort their shit out. I doubt we'll see many more poor shots going forward.
Our bowling brains trust is glaringly lacking though. And it's too late to bring in anyone now.
Moz, I said from the getgo that it's the worst Protea team to represent South Africa at a WC.
Too true Denny...sigh!
A far cry from the palmy days of Hansies side and captainancy...chalk and cheese
Cronje, Pollock, Rhodes, Gibbs, Donald, Kallis,Klusener,Boucher, Cullingham, Benkenstein Elworthy, Boje etc.
A long, long way off. The best side in the world in the last 20 years.
Well now West Indies have bowled Pakistan to a dismal score of 105...