Proteas must stay grounded

First win only the beginning – AB

PROTEAS captain A B de Villiers said his team would not fall into the trap of getting too far ahead of themselves as they head to Durban for the second ODI against Sri Lanka on Wednesday.

South Africa swept aside a meek challenge from the tourists in the first of five matches between the teams at St George’s Park on Saturday.

Thanks mainly to a telling performance with ball where they restricted Sri Lanka to 181 all out, De Villiers’s men romped home by eight wickets with all of 94 balls to spare. But with four matches remaining in the series, the skipper said they would have to have their wits about them.

“It’s a completely new game. We will get there with a fresh mind. It’s only 1-0 and not like we’ve won the series already. There’s still a lot to work for and a lot to achieve in the series. We will start from scratch and try and assess what’s happening in Durbs and hopefully come away with a good win there,” said De Villiers, who stroked 30 not out to add to an unbeaten 55 by Faf du Plessis and a fine 57 from Hashim Amla.

De Villiers said his team had handled both the ground and weather conditions well.

“I was very proud of the performance. I thought the guys played exceptionally well. The conditions reminded me of a Sri Lankan pitch we played on not long ago. So we really had to adapt well in the beginning.

“I was quite worried that their spinners were going to play a big role in the second half of the game. I knew we had to bowl them out for less than 250 in order to stay in the game. The new ball bowlers asked the right questions and obviously Imran [Tahir] opened it up very nicely for everyone to have a fantastic session in the field.”

Left-arm seamer Wayne Parnell struck two early blows to set the tone for the innings and eventually finished with three wickets as did the evergreen Tahir.

“I was very proud of Wayne’s performance. He bowled with pace upfront and with really good control and a little bit of swing. He made it a lot easier for me in the first 10 overs.”

An 80km/h wind lashed the stadium on Saturday and that, coupled with a shower of aqueous bullets, made life challenging for the players. De Villiers smiled when asked about the overhead conditions and said he had actually played in worse in Sri Lanka in 2014.

“In Hambantota, the deciding game was actually worse than this. I definitely used some of those experiences today in the field, in some of my field placings, the plans for the bowlers. It’s always nice to draw back to experiences like those and use them. I alerted the guys of that before we went out; we don’t use it as an excuse but rather to our advantage which we did I thought. Made them hit into the wind a lot and it paid off at the end of the day.” —