Titans shoot themselves in the foot with poor performance
The Unlimited Titans left their supporters very disappointed with a poor performance against the Dolphins on Wednesday in Centurion and now their chances to qualify for the playoffs are hanging on a thin thread.
The Unlimited Titans left their worst performance of the T20 season for the home stretch in this year’s Ram Slam T20 challenge.
Some bitterly disappointed spectators left SuperSport Park on Wednesday night even before the end of the game between the Titans and the Dolphins.
The reason for this was that the home team, batting first, could only manage to scrape together 115 runs in 20 overs.
The Dolphins surpassed this total with ease in the seventeenth over, after they just missed out on the batting bonus point in the previous over.
Dolphin’s captain, Morné van Wyk, won the toss and he decided to send the Titans in to bat first. The home team’s innings had a disastrous start with a wicket that fell in each of the first three overs. When Roelof van der Merwe, that was strangely sent in to bat before the in-form Albie Morkel, lost his wicket in the ninth over, the Titans were in deep trouble on 46 for the lost of four wickets.
After Van der Merwe’s departure Albie Morkel and Farhaan Behardien came together and, like so many times before this season in this series, they were able to build the biggest partnership in the Titans’ innings. The two stalwarts unfortunately also struggled to get going, which eventually led to the Titans’ low score.
The disappointed home crowd suddenly got hope when the Dolphins’ first wicket fell early in their innings. Thereafter Morné van Wyk (50*) and Cody Chetty (50) however broke the hearts of the hopeful Titans supporters with their partnership of 84 runs. This partnership ended with the Dolphins’ score on 112, which means that the game was basically already won.
With this poor performance the Titans basically shot themselves in the foot, because their fate in the Ram Slam T20 Challenge is no longer in their own hands. They will first have to beat the Knights this coming Sunday in Kimberley. Then they must hope that the Cobras will do the same to the Warriors in Cape Town. If these two scenarios materialise, the Titans will end in the third place on the log, which means that they will qualify for the semi-final.
However, if the Warriors can manage to beat the Cobras or the Titans loose to the Knights, the men from Centurion will taste the humiliation to be in the T20 wilderness after two years as qualifiers for the International Champions Trophy series.
