The South Africans are embarrassed by the huge run margin they lost with and captain AB de Villiers says his unit will have to urgently regroup and look into the performance against India before going into their next match.
Addressing the post-match Press conference at the MCG on Sunday, de Villiers went down hard on the team for doing unpardonable things. “Two run-outs, absolutely unacceptable in the top six. They cost us a lot. The top six are there to win games for you. It could have been my night or David’s but we both sat on the side not even being dismissed by a bowler, which is disappointing,” he said.
Elaborating on the overall performance he said, “It’s difficult to put it down to exactly where we went wrong. Quite a few areas where we just didn’t play as well as we wanted to. We started pretty slow with the ball in hand. We had a chance halfway through the game but unfortunately just lost our way completely with the bat in hand.”
Talking about the wicket, de Villiers said, “It got a bit too paced in the evening. Without making any excuses, it did play a little bit difficult in the evening. It’s not often that a South African team struggles against short pitch deliveries, but it was two-paced. One skids on, one got stuck in the wicket a bit,” he said.
Speaking on Wayne Parnell who gave away too many runs, the skipper said, “He got it wrong with his disciplines today. No balls are unacceptable throughout an innings. We spoke about that at length in bowling meetings before, and yet he bowled a couple of no balls which cost him. And then that drop catch didn’t do him any favours.”
He said the loss was a result of a bit of bad bowling by the South Africans and a bit of good batting by the Indians. “I spoke to Hashim after the innings. He actually mentioned to me that he was quite impressed with the bowling performance from India. I thought they were quite clever tonight, but definitely a poor batting performance (by us),” de Villiers said.