SCOTS WILL HAVE TO LEARN QUICKLY, SAYS BURGER

SCOTLAND head coach Shane Burger insisted his team ‘wouldn’t be defined’ by their 130-run hammering by Afghanistan. The South African admitted the loss in their first Super 12 game of the Twenty20 World Cup was a ‘tough pill to swallow’ but vowed that Scotland would bounce back in the rest of the tournament. The Saltires face fellow Associate country Namibia tomorrow and Burger hopes to see more of the cricket that had earned his side plentiful praise last week. He said: ‘We have some world-class players in our team and, given more opportunity, more time in the middle under pressure like we had this evening, performances will be more consistent. ‘I don’t think this loss defines us as a team or defines them as individuals. ‘It’s a game of cricket where things turned pretty quickly. Character is defined by how you come back from something like this. ‘We’ll learn a lot from this. We know that we’re better than what we showed. The game of T20 cricket can change very quickly as we saw and we’ve got to learn in the future to be able to handle those moments a lot better. It’s a tough pill to swallow but we’ll swallow it and move on and make sure we bring out better performances in the future. ‘We’ve set a few goals for this stage of this tournament. We’re in waters we’ve never been in before but that doesn’t mean we can’t stick to what’s been going well for us. ‘Tonight won’t stop us. It’s just a hurdle to where we want to get to. ‘We need to forget about this pretty quickly, put it aside and go again.’ Captain Kyle Coetzer felt it had been a reality check of the levels needed to try to compete with the better nations for the remainder of the tournament. He said: ‘Clearly it wasn’t one of our better days. ‘We played some really good cricket to get to this stage and sometimes things don’t quite go to plan. It’s also a real sighter for us to see this is where the level is against a very