Rain grants plodding Proteas a reprieve

Proteas captain Faf du Plessis admitted on Monday that when the notification came through from the umpires that their World Cup match against the West Indies had been abandoned, he was a happy man.

The No Result outcome gave South Africa their belated first point of the competition, meaning their semi-final hopes are still alive albeit on life support, but it also allowed them to avoid what would have been an extremely tricky situation had play resumed and maybe just a 20-over match been played.

With their score on 29 for two after 7.3 overs, South Africa would have had just 12-and-a-half overs in which to thrash out some sort of total for the West Indies to chase with all 10 wickets intact.

Plus the fact that they had lost two wickets meant the DLS system would not have given them many, if any, runs extra when the target was recalculated.

“Well, the horse is out the shed but we wanted a full game, especially against the West Indies, you want it to go the full 100 overs given the make-up of their side. But you can’t control the weather so we’ll take the one point and move forward. The nature of chasing always favours the team batting second in a shortened game and we had batted seven overs without expecting it to be shortened, which affects the pace you go, and we lost those two wickets.

“The further the game goes towards a T20 contest, the more the odds go heavily in the West Indies’ favour. So later in the day we were obviously happy to take our one point and go. Our position remains that we have to win every game, it’s as simple as that and it’s because we haven’t played our best cricket. We don’t deserve to be anywhere near the top of the log,” Du Plessis said.

Perhaps the biggest negative from the stalemate was that some of the batsmen had no time out in the middle, which they desperately need as they look to regain confidence for the daunting challenges ahead.

“It was important for us to get some cricket and to start ticking over. I was hoping we could get 200+ and then there was enough in that pitch for us to defend that. But we need to start playing some more solid cricket and the only way we will get confidence is from producing a performance. We need an individual to stand up for us, KG Rabada did that to some extent against India, he picked the bowling unit up.

“We need a performance that the other players can feed off. Nothing else needs to be cleared out of our minds, as a team we are still very strong and still enjoying this tour. We just haven’t put in the performance we need. It can happen when you lose two or three games that the cracks start showing and the blame game starts, but we are very far away from that,” Du Plessis said.

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