Proteas Rise Up Reliance ICC Rankings

Momentum Proteas captain Mignon du Preez was understandably disappointed at her side’s poor showing in their final ICC Cricket World Cup match against Sri Lanka, which they lost by 88 runs, and admitted they still have a long way to go before the next tournament.

The Momentum Proteas, who won two of their six World Cup matches, rose two places from their number eight position at the start of the showpiece event, to sixth position in the Reliance ICC rankings.

“It was really frustrating, knowing that we have done a lot of hard work but it never comes through when it’s supposed to. It seems we do really well in the unimportant matches, and fail to deliver when it counts,” she said.

“We have learned a lot from our experiences here, and hopefully we will be able to go back home and correct the errors made today and in this tournament as a whole.”

She conceded that it was important for the team to excel in all aspects of the game if they hoped to do well on the world stage. She, however, believes that her side has shown great improvement compared to recent years.

“Obviously we need to go back home, re-visit the situation and get to the bottom of why things went so wrong,” said du Preez.

“We have had instances where we do extremely well in one or two of our disciplines and miss out on winning a match, because we fall short on the third, and we need to look at how we can back ourselves more and make sure we have all our bases covered,” she concluded.

The day went Sri Lanka’s way from the beginning. After winning the toss and batting first, they posted a competitive 244/7 with solid contributions from most of the batting line-up.

After the Shabnim Ismail and Chloe Tyron had taken the respective wickets of Yasoda Mendis (1) and Prasadani Weerakkody (8), Chamari Atapattu (52) did well to rebuild the innings together with Deepika Rasangika. They shared a well earned 68-run partnership, before the latter was dismissed by Sunette Loubser for 48, just missing out on a deserved half-century.

Shashikala Siriwardene (44) joined Atapattu and shared an 84-run partnership that saw the game taken away from South Africa. Eshani Kaushalya also made an important contribution of 43 from 31 balls, to set her side up nicely.

It was always going to be a tough ask to get to 245, but wickets lost in clusters did not help the South African cause. In a tale that kept repeating itself, Yolandi Potgieter (10) lost her wicket in the fifth over, followed by captain, Mignon du Preez (7) in the tenth. Trisha Chetty (15) followed in the 12th and it seemed the situation was going downhill until Shandré Fritz entered the fray.

Her 50-run partnership with Dané van Niekerk gave South Africa a semblance of hope until those hopes were dashed when Fritz was run out.

South Africa was eventually all out for 156 runs.

South Africa will join the rest of the teams in Mumbai for the first time since the warm-up matches, to watch the final match between Australia and the West Indies on Sunday, 17 February.