Eoin Morgan’s men have been busy over the weekend securing two victories in Cape Town and Paarl in the first part of their limited-overs series in South Africa.
Far too often we hear sports teams playing a “Brand” of their game and this doesn’t just apply to Football or Rugby, it can apply massively in cricket too. It just comes down to finding that right brand and style.
As Mark Boucher has said, South Africa need to be playing “Smart” and “Aggressive” cricket and that is something that we haven’t seen a lot of yet.
If the Proteas want to finish the T20 series 2-1 and not 3-0, we need to see more from them and not just watch a side go through the motions. The team need to bring more of a fight and hunger to win within the match.
So far, we have seen Kagiso Rabada, Anrich Nortje be powerful with the ball and Faf Du Plessis and Quinton de Kock be just as good with the bat. But where as England are a side who know their individual roles on the team sheet, South Africa are still learning.
Not playing international cricket since March and only a handful of players having experience from this years Indian Premier League, you could see the lack of experience on the field.
In the first T20, we saw the ex-skipper, face an over from Tom Curran that went for 24 runs, as he hit 6-4-6-2-2-4. He was just phenomenal with the willow.
De Kock’s natural game is just “Aggressive” in itself, he’s looking far more confident as white-ball captain.
Temba Bavuma showed glimpses of “Aggression” yesterday, but as always, he does something reckless like on Friday when he played the reverse-sweep shot in the sixth ball of the game, along with a few other Proteas who were reckless.
Cheltenham CC’s overseas professional, Josh Breed from Cape Town has spoken exclusively to Park Life Sport about what South Africa need to do in order to get the series to a 2-1 finish and not a 3-0 defeat from England.
“From my side, I reckon one thing for me is like team selection has been quite poor, Beuran Hendricks playing that first game, everyone kind of knew he would have a shocker, and he did have a shocker, but the main thing for me is South Africa’s power hitting in the middle.” He said.
“Last game (Rassie) van der Dussen batted at five, Faf (du Plessis) was at four, Reeza (Hendricks) was at three, (Temba) Bavuma was at the top.
“It’s like they’re so reliant on (Quinton) de Kock and he’s prone to getting like 50 and up, I think they miss (David) Miller big time and obviously him not at 5 is massive for us because I can then see where our power-hitting can come from.
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“(Heinrich) Klaasen I think is a really good player but he needs more time to get in before he whacks it, Linde is a very good cricketer but you can’t place too much pressure on him as he’s just come into international cricket so someone like Miller has been missed massively
“If we can pick an all-rounder along with linde, I think our batting also stops at seven at the moment. If we had eight, nine, ten, and eleven
“It’s a lot of pressure on the top order to do the bulk of the scoring, they’re playing with a lot of pressure and they can’t really whack it like, van der Dussen at five is way too low. Like if you compare him to Ben Stokes batting at five for England, at six, it’s Eoin Morgan, he can whack it. I reckon if we can pick a few all-rounders, I like Linde like I said, so Linde can be picked with (Andile) Phehlukwayo or someone like that then I think that will help us a lot.
“I do also think that the toss is quite important, the English side bats so deep. Rashid was batting at eleven, Archer; ten and he whacked it at the IPL. So I reckon, they are really good chasers, like anything South Africa hit, England are favourites to chase it down.”
