South Africa’s substandard run in the game seems to continue as the Proteas were thrashed by England in the second ODI. The hosts were restricted to a below par 262 as England bowled accurately to keep the Proteas in check. Despite skipper AB De Villiers’ 73, South Africa could not get to a healthy total. England had no real issues in chasing the total down as Alex Hales led with his knock of 99.
De Villiers post the game said that despite the loss, he was confident about South Africa’s fightback. “Over the past three series we’ve played, we’ve only played similar to that once and we came out the back of that challenge really well today,” he said. “The style of cricket that we do play is great and hopefully, down the line we will improve as a team and that will help us win more competitions and strive to be a better side. Today’s performance shows we are not all crash, bang, wallop. we can play proper cricket, ” said De Villiers.
“England are a good side. They are playing some good cricket at the moment, they look confident but they are not unbeatable,” De Villiers said. “We had a couple of opportunities in both the games we played and I know it sounds like I am singing the same song from the Test matches but it’s true, it’s a matter of getting it right and taking our opportunities. In Bloemfontein we had a chance to get it right, I knew that rain was going to come and we didn’t get the timing right. Today again, we had the opportunity to take them down and unfortunately it didn’t happen that way.”
“I thought 280 was par and I said 300 would have been nice. We’ve got the potential in our batting line-up to get scores like that,” De Villiers said. “Unfortunately I got out at a bad time and a couple of dismissals later we were in trouble,” he concluded.