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English cricket team concludes their SA tour with T20 victory in Centurion

Thanks to a stunning knock by their captain, the English cricket team on Sunday in Centurion managed to win their last T20 match on their tour of South Africa.

Eoin Morgan launched a six-hitting blitz to get his England side over the line by five wickets with five balls to spare over the Proteas at SuperSport Park on Sunday.

The result gave England a 2-1 win in the T20 International series against the South Africans, to go with their victory in the Test series and the drawn One-Day series.

The England captain also finished the T20 series as the leading runs scorer on either side with the Proteas opening pair of Quinton de Kock and Temba Bavuma being the next best.

It was a fitting end to what has been a high-quality series with a total of 26 sixes being hit by the two sides while almost 450 runs were put on the scoreboard.

Morgen won both accolades as Man of the match and Man of the Series. His contribution was seven sixes in a half-century that took only 21 balls and it was his partnership of 61 off 27 balls with Ben Stokes that really settled the issue as they chased down a target that had soared to more than 12 runs to the over.

It was England’s second highest successful runs chase against the Proteas, only being bettered by the 230 they had to make at Mumbai four years ago.

In spite of the disappointment of the series defeat the Proteas can take some important positives out of the series, the most important being the settled and successful opening batting partnership between Quinton de Kock and Temba Bavuma. They had successive partnerships in this series of 48, 92 and then Sunday’s effort of 84.

They have regularly enabled the Proteas to score more than 60 in the power play overs.

A second positive on Sunday was the innings of local hero Heinrich Klaasen, who smashed 66 off 33 balls and gave the Proteas the impact in the middle order that they can build on going forward. It was his first white ball appearance for the Proteas in just over a year and he is clearly going to figure in the plans for the future building up to the T20 World Cup in October and November this year in Australia.

 

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Koos Venter

Koos Venter is an experienced journalist who started his career 35 years ago, before the days of cellphones, modern computer systems, the internet and digital cameras, as a correspondent for Nexus, the former national magazine of the Department of Correctional Services. He has since worked for various other publications in all aspects of news coverage, as a columnist and in the production side of newspapers and online publications. Since 2007 he has specialized as a sports writer, while he is also regularly used as an analyst and commentator by several radio stations.
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