India vs South Africa: We needed 300, 269 wasn’t enough on that deck, says Faf du Plessis

Faf du Plessis slammed his ninth ODI century against India during the first ODI at Durban on Thursday. But his valiant effort with the bat was not enough to save the Proteas from succumbing to a defeat against India. Ruing the lack of partnerships throughout the innings, the South African captain maintained that 269 simply wasn’t enough on the day to put pressure on the opposition. Du Plessis also said that the failures against spinners will not hamper their mindset and the batsmen will need a couple of matches to get accustomed to them.

Speaking to reporters after the match, “Yeah we didn’t bat well today. As a batting unit, for the second top score to be 30 something [37] shows that there wasn’t partnerships. And the most basic thing about one-day cricket is two guys getting together and putting some sort of partnership together.”

“I thought the Indian spinners bowled well but still we should have been better today against them. Even though the conditions are challenging, you’re international cricket players so you should adapt to it a little bit better and we didn’t adapt to it at all today. We lost too many wickets in that middle period, and if you lose wickets, it’s difficult to create any sort of partnership and put pressure back on the opposition,” cricbuzz quoted him saying.

“I think certainly tonight we needed 300. 260 [269] wasn’t enough on that deck. The last two games we played here, we got more runs and won games of cricket. We chased 370 here against Australia. So, think it’s unfair to say to the bowlers tonight that they were poor. I thought purely we didn’t have runs. The way the wicket played and the way that our bowlers had to try and get wickets made it difficult for them. If we had got 60-70 more, it would have been easier for them out there.”

Reflecting on the mediocre performance by the Proteas batsmen, Du Plessis emphasized on the need to play the spinners better. “From a batting point of view, quite a few guys haven’t faced their spinners, so it will take one or two games for them to get used to it. Some of the guys played against these guys in the IPL but not all of them faced them recently.

With mystery spin or wrist spin, it takes you one or two games just to get used to the guys’ actions and their wrists, then hopefully you get better at playing them. We’ll have a good discussion after this game and some feedback on the things we picked up, especially from my side, if there was anything that I can share with the guys that I picked up. And hopefully, in the second game we’ll play them better.”

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