Srilanka won the toss and elect to bat
The first group match between two Test playing nations in this World Cup and it’s turning out to be a mismatch at the moment. A bad toss to win for Srilanka? He boldly chose to bat and things unraveled pretty quickly. The first two overs set the stall for South Africa, Nissanka tried to break the shackles and offered Baartman a wicket off his first ball in World Cups, things then went from bad to worse. Nortje and Maharaj ripped through the middle-order – Sri Lanka didn’t help themselves with some muddled thinking and careless batting. A slew of mishits, a set of desperate slogs and Sri Lanka found themselves in absolute disarray. Coming to the pitch and the conditions, The outfield being slow made it even more painful for the players and this was quite a challenging wicket for a T20. Just the first game here where there are still 7 more games to be played. Will be interesting to see if the drop-in pitches play any differently in those games. Remember South Africa will play two more games here so they will be pleased that they got off to a winning start which should help them going forward. Group D is the group of death as it has Netherlands and Bangladesh too.
Anrich Nortje | Player of the Match – Definitely, this will get some momentum going. Tough few days, we’ve worked hard and it’s nice to get some momentum. Very happy, I’ve been feeling good from the last few games, finally great to have a good game and get a few wickets. The guys did well to restrict them to a low score. Been a while since I got many wickets and was happy to be helpful in the team’s win. We needed to assess as quickly as possible (on the conditions), it was up and down at times (on the wicket), I needed to hit my straps, hit the wicket hard, it was important that we got some early wickets. It was a tough one, practicing on these drop-in wickets is hard, we weren’t able to bowl on the pitch on the pre-match day, the plans were simple, that helped me, I just need to get my rhythm better in the next few games.
Sri Lanka captain: Our batters tried for 160-170. To be honest this was a 120 wicket especially with our bowlers. We went with our strength – our bowling, that’s why we batted first. We wanted to put a score and then defend. This is early in the tournament and we have three more games, we want to do much better, especially with our batting talent. If our batting does well, we can finish well.
South Africa captain: Happy with the win. The batting was little up and down, probably speaks to quite a tough wicket and luckily we found ways to score on this. It was a tough one from a batting point of view, we try as much as we can to take the pitch out of it, we can take some learnings from it and we are experienced. Lots of different conditions as we move around, fortunately we have our next two here so we know what’s coming but it’s important to adapt as we go ahead. Was not worried about him but a fantastic day for him, from a mental confidence point of view. He is massively loved in the changeroom, boys are incredibly happy and proud of him, hopefully this kicks off a great World Cup for him.