Follow UsSouth Africa’s last group game is against Nepal on June 14 (Friday) but the Proteas have already confirmed their spot in the Super 8s of the 2024 T20 World Cup. Kagiso Rabada feels South Africa could all the way and lift their maiden ICC trophy but for now, the paceman wants to focus on one game at a time.
“I believe we're going to win it and you just have to take it game by game. You can't look too far ahead. It's another international match, another fixture and we're not taking them lightly and we're going to try and play some more of the same cricket or even better that we've been playing in the tournament,” said Rabada.
South Africa played their first three games in New York where the run scoring was extremely difficult. They won all their three games but their batters found it tough to get going. It took South Africa more than 16 overs to chase down a target of 78 against Sri Lanka and 18.5 overs to hunt down 104 against the Netherlands.
They batted first against Bangladesh but could only score 113, which they managed to defend by four runs. Not a single South African batter has a strike rate of more than 100 in the ongoing 20-over showpiece event but Rabada knows that will change now that they have moved out of New York. Their game against Nepal will be played in St Vincent.
“I think that the guys are really keen for the challenge and with us it's just about winning. Whether we score 96 and win or whether we score 296 and win. At the end of the day, it's about the W. And that's what we've done so far. But I do expect that conditions are going to level up. Because you had the drop-in pitches in the USA. You never really know how they're going to play,” said Rabada.
“Now you've actually got squares that have been there for years, here in these venues. And you'll probably see more competitive scores. And you look at the game between Australia and England, where 200 played 150. So, if you do bat well in these conditions, you can still reach 200. But you want to get a game and find pitches where you have enough in it for the bowlers and enough in it for the batters, because that's essentially what a cricket game is.
“But you can't really judge their form on wickets that we've just played on. As much as it's not an excuse, but common sense would prevail. And you would say that you can't really blame the batters. But in saying that, no one's got any demons. Everyone's moving forward. We play the conditions as we see them. And on our day, we know the sky's a limit in terms of batting.”
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