South Africa wicket-keeper batter Heinrich Klaasen praises Bangladesh cricketers and says that it was the Bangladesh bowlers’ skill on a slow wicket that drove them to bat first against Bangladesh.

South Africa beat Bangladesh by 4 runs in another low scoring thriller in New York on Monday (June 11). Tanzim Hasan Sakib ran riot through the South African top order to leave them reeling at 24-4. However, David Miller and Heinrich Klaasen depicted a comeback partnership to bring Proteas back into the game before Bangladesh pulled things back in the death overs. In reply, the bowlers of South Africa showed their class to hand Proteas a 4-run narrow victory over Bangladesh.

South Africa also played their last two games on the same wicket against Sri Lanka and Netherlands, so it was their third game on the same wicket against Bangladesh. “Third game on the wicket. These guys are incredible when a wicket becomes very slow, so that was the biggest reason why we didn’t want to chase 120. If because the wicket was definitely better than other games, given Bangladesh the pressure is on and they have to go into cutters. They’ve got some of the world’s best cutter bowlers and their spinners are high-quality. So that was the biggest reason why we chose to bat first,” Klaasen said.

At the start, Quinton de Kock started off very attackingly as he scored 18 runs off 11 balls on such a tricky wicket. But a great delivery from Sakib that was low, uprooted de Kock’s stumps. Klaasen thinks that was effective considering the pitch. “Yeah, definitely. I think only two ways you can go about it in the powerplay, it’s either try to survive and build up the innings to let’s say the 12th over, wickets in hand and see what you can do. Or you gotta go extremely hard and that’s what Quinton wanted to do today. That was his game plan for the previous game as well to go extremely hard in the powerplay because it’s already difficult to get the ball out of the inner ring. So, it’s better to hit it up in the end, find some space in the outfield.

“He got a ball that kept low, otherwise that ball would have also kept on travelling into the third tier. Today he was hitting it nice and sweetly. So you can go hard at it or you have to keep your wickets in hand. He got us a good start and then we lost couple of wickets that put us right back exactly like the other games as well,” Klaasen added.