“We’ve got a very good batting line-up. From No. 1 to 8‚ they can take the game away from you.
“We got ourselves into trouble early‚ bogging ourselves down. We played catch-up [cricket] with a lot of very soft dismissals.
“We just panicked and did stuff that some of the batters wouldn’t generally do.”
How to fix it?
“We need to bat. If you want to win a World Cup you need to chase down 108 convincingly. We didn’t do that.
“We need to do some introspection as batters and find out where we’re going wrong. Since the warm-ups we’ve been struggling to get to 100.”
SA stumbled to 79/9 in a warm-up against Australia and 72/9 against Pakistan‚ and things might well have turned out differently had the bowlers not limited Sri Lanka to 99/8 in their first match of the tournament on Tuesday — when they won by seven wickets with nine balls remaining.
Something similar seemed on the cards on Thursday‚ what with Shabnim Ismail screaming in with a gale blowing at her back to take 3/12 and Van Niekerk claiming 2/8 from three overs.