India vs South Africa — 3rd T20I
After losing two straight matches, India(IND) faced South Africa(SA) again with the hope of staying alive in the series by winning this match on 14th June at ACA-VDCA Stadium, Vishakhapatnam.
This was the third time when IND lost the toss in the series under the captaincy of Rishabh Pant and SA being unchanged choose to bowl first. In the first innings, Ruturaj Gaikwad and Ishan Kishan opened for IND where in the first three overs they had a slow start but from 4th over on wards they started hitting boundaries and giving runs in almost every ball. They made total 97 runs in partnership till the dismissal of Gaikwad in the 10th over by Keshav Maharaj. On third in the batting order was Shreyas Iyer who after playing 1–2 overs left the crease in the 13th over, even Ishan Kishan was dismissed by Dwaine Pretorius in the 14th over. In the death overs there were two key dismissals of skipper Rishabh Pant and finisher Dinesh Karthik, where Hardik Pandya and Axar Patel ended the innings with a total of 179 runs.
In the second innings, Temba Bavuma opened with Reeza Hendricks from SA where in the first three overs they had to face a lot of dots but from the 4th over they started making some runs but by the end of that over SA skipper Bavuma was dismissed by Axar Patel. By the end of the powerplay even Reeza Hendricks was dismissed by Harshal Patel. In the middle overs there were four dismissals of players like David Miller, Rassie vd Dussen, Dwaine Pretorius and Heinrich Klassen which made it really difficult for SA to chase the target. With 102 runs made by SA, they needed almost 70 runs more to win this game in the death overs which needed consistent batting. After dismissal of Kagiso Rabada by Harshal Patel, Bhuvneshwar Kumar took another two wickets of Keshav Maharaj and Anrich Nortje. In the last over IND was just one dismissal away from victory where Harshal Patel took the wicket of Tabraiz Shamsi in the very first ball of the over and won this match by 48 runs.
In the above chart we can clearly notice that after the first dismissal SA was lagging behind IND in every phase. SA was nowhere close to IND anytime in the match. In this match, Indian bowlers played an important role in middle overs to dismiss important players which paved their way to this smooth win.
If you wanna read my analysis of previous match head over to:
Note: The analysis is solely number based. Climatic and pitch conditions are not taken into consideration.