A whitewash of the Windies
 Hashim Amla - Man of the series - Picture from Graeme Smith's Twitpic |
The Proteas beat the West Indies 5 -0 in the One Day International series for the third time since readmission to international cricket, the West Indies should be relegated to the ‘b’ league. According to CricInfo’s stat’s guru, since 2000 the West Indies have lost 46 games from 75 played… at home! That’s a disgrace.
Never mind the useless West Indies lets look at our boys, the controversial decision to drop Mark Boucher become a farce when David Miller was injured in practise, they brought Boucher back into the team as a specialist batsman. Boucher has played 292 games as a keeper and they bring him back into the team to field at third man? what a disgraceful end to a magnificent ODI career. |
How can the team management allow themselves to get into a position where they are left exposed by the injury of one player? They released Loots Bosman early, on the same night as the 5th ODI he scored 94 off 49 balls for Derbyshire in FP T20 in England. More poor leadership and team management …
Enough criticism, oh wait Graeme Smith only managed to score 119 runs in five innings, this man is under pressure – but we believe Graeme, we wait in anticipation for your return to form.
AB de Villiers and Hashim Amla, world class batsmen, both of them played fantastic cricket. Amla scored 402 runs at an average of 80.40 and a strike rate of 101.25. Which is a new record for a South African batsman as his 402 is the highest total score over a 5 match ODI series. Amla received the man of the series award and 5 Blackberry’s for his efforts, he shot up the ODI rankings to no. 4 in the world. Could Hashim Amla be come the best batsman South Africa has ever produced?
de Villiers scored 283 runs at 70.75 and a strike rate of 95.60 – and kept wicket, the importance of this batting display is that keeping wicket hasn’t affected his abilities with the bat. AB needs to work on his keeping, he gave away a few runs and a catch or two behind the stumps.
It was a good outing for our bowlers as well, Morne Morkel took the most wickets in the series even though the didn’t play every game.
There are two areas of our game that concern me, firstly when the West Indian batsmen did get in and started scoring runs freely, we didn’t seem to have a plan to stop them. It’s as if we wait for the batsmen to get themselves out… And the run chase in the last game, that was dismal, our middle to lower order did not perform with the bat.
Well played boys, 2 from 2 in the T20 series, 5 from 5 in the ODI series, now can we take the Test series as convincingly? I think we can.
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Come to think of it why didn’t they play Alviro Petersen ahead of Mark Boucher?