Prior to the tournament I warned that there was a problem with the makeup the side and the South African brainstrust have nobody to blame but themselves.
In my humble opinion Faf Du Plessis and Imran Tahir were probably the only players in the side to really enhance their international credentials while AB De Villiers and Hashim Amla did their bit. For the rest it was a pretty average performance.
I'm not blaming Robin Peterson completely but he came in at number 8 with 128/6 on the scoreboard. If he and Faf had stayed together - as the allrounders in the side - they could have done a run a ball and gotten us home. Instead he scored zip.
JP Duminy and Johan Botha at 5 and 7, can't be getting out for 3 and 2 respectively.
We can go back to the England game which we tossed away when the pressure was put on us. Duminy (0), Peterson (3) and Morkel (1) didn't keep their heads.
I go back to the point I raised pre the World Cup - we were not building a team for this competition designed to peak in March 2011. One moment Lopsy was going to add variety to the attack, the next he didn't play any big name cricket. At the same time Wayne Parnell was supposed to be the answer to our number 8 allrounder problems and then we decided we didn't need to fill this critical role.
Why invest all that time in Ingram and Miller if they weren't going to be part of the bigger picture? We could really have used an extra batter especially with AB doing the keeping duties.
I'm just looking on Twitter now and seeing all of the sympathetic messages that "winning isn't everything" etc.... KAK - a lot of effort has been put into this side and their goal was to be primed for this event. In short somebody has to take responsibility for this and its got to be the Proteas brainstrust - we can't accept this result.
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