De Kock upbeat despite loss
STAND-IN SKIPPER: SRI LANKA PLAYED SMART CRICKET
While there was obvious disappointment at losing his first game as official South Africa captain, the positivity of Quinton de Kock shone through afterwards despite the Proteas’ threerun loss to Sri Lanka in a rain-affected fourth ODI in Kandy.
Wednesday’s defeat ended an 11-match winning streak against Sri Lanka, as the South Africans were without key players in regular captain Faf du Plessis, Tabraiz Shamsi and Kagiso Rabada, but De Kock was able to see the bigger picture with the World Cup less than a year away.
“It’s always frustrating for both the teams and the fans to have the rain delays, but at least it still provided some excitement and we were still able to get a great game out of it. The whole series has been one-sided, so to have a close game like that was nice. It was obviously unfortunate and disappointing though that we ended on the losing side.
“We will try and fix what we did wrong and hopefully win the last game in Colombo on Sunday,” De Kock said after the match.
It is not the first time South Africa have messed up a chase in rainy conditions against Sri Lanka – a 2003 World Cup game in Durban still lingers painfully in the memory – but to not win from the position they were in, needing 43 runs from six overs with five wickets in hand, will be galling.
De Kock praised how smart the Sri Lankan bowlers were, banning yorkers from their arsenal in the closing overs.
“We thought the total (191 in 21 overs) we were chasing was par because it was a good batting pitch that was only getting better. But they bowled very well, they kept the pressure on us and got wickets at the right time. It was a very clever way of going about things, but they had to be clever and they were just better than us in the second part of the innings,” the wicketkeeper/batsman said.
“In the 15th and 16th overs, we realised the ball was swinging from one end,” Sri Lankan seamer Thisara Perera explained. “The ball was still new, so we decided to bowl wicket-to-wicket, and it’s not easy to bat when you bowl like that. We noticed that in our innings as well.
“So we planned to stick to that line as fast bowlers because they then have to take the risk to try and hit over the field. What we did in the last few overs was to forget about yorkers, and try to bowl a Test-match line and length. That’s what worked out for us.”