The Dolphins entered the Champions League Twenty20 2014 high on confidence, having won the Ram Slam T20 challenge – South Africa’s domestic T20 competition. However, after successive losses to Perth Scorchers and Chennai Super Kings, they find themselves on the brink of elimination.
For Dolphins to have an outside chance of qualifying for the semifinals, they have to pray for the rain gods to stay away from Bangalore, defeat Lahore Lions and Kolkata Knight Riders, who have won 12 consecutive matches, by huge margins, and then hope for a number of other results to go their way. The chances of that happening are as bleak as the Bangalore weather, but Morne van Wyk, the Dolphins captain, preferred to look at the broader perspective in terms of the learnings from the tour.
“It has been a steep learning curve for all of us,” he said on Friday (September 26), the eve of their match against Lahore in Bangalore. “We wanted to test ourselves against the best in the world and we have come up against the best in the world. It shows the difference between domestic cricket back home and what international cricket is all about. But we haven’t backed away from the challenge.”
A glance at the Dolphins squad for the tournament is enough to understand Van Wyk’s point. Only two players apart from Van Wyk – Kyle Abbott and Vaughn van Jaarsveld – have played for South Africa, and their combined international experience amounts to 31 matches. Only Van Wyk has the prior experience of playing in India, and the captain hoped that his young side would learn a thing or two from the Indian Premier League teams.
“One thing we’ve seen from the Indian sides is that they have a lot of scoring options on both sides of the wicket,” he said. “If we can take a leaf from the way Chennai played, they kept pushing us on the back foot by scoring boundaries regularly. They put the bowlers under pressure by scoring boundaries in the first or second balls of the over, and I hope we can do that as well.”
Van Wyk, 35, stressed on the importance of converting starts while batting, and asked his team to learn from the way Suresh Raina and Brendon McCullum batted in their previous match. As many as seven Dolphins batsmen have gone past 20 in both their matches, but only one of them has converted it into a half-century.
“We’ve had some promising 20s and 30s, but that was the difference between us and Chennai,” he said. “Raina and McCullum converted their starts and that took the game away from us. We bat deep, which means we can be very positive, but we don’t want to be happy with 20s and 30s. It will help in posting decent scores, but not match-winning totals.”
Comparing the conditions in South Africa and India, Van Wyk said that the differences in ground sizes made a big difference to the par scores.
“A score of 220 here is equivalent of 190 back home,” he said. “We cannot be happy with totals of 180, we have to keep pushing for a winning score. Back home, any score around 140 is defendable as the grounds are big and the pitches assist bowlers.”
The results may not have gone their way, but the Dolphins promise to continue the aggressive brand of cricket that they’re known for.
“We’d like to be proud of our performances when we go off the field, it doesn’t necessarily relate to the result,” said Van Wyk. “Everyone back home talk about the brand of cricket that the Dolphins can play, and we showed a bit of that in the last match. We’d like to continue playing that way and entertain people.”