‘It was just that bad night’: Aiden Markram’s painful confession after beating New Zealand | Cricket News –

South Africa captain Eden Markram admitted it was just a night when his team made little progress as the New Zealand national cricket team stormed into the T20 World Cup final with a crushing nine-wicket win at Eden Gardens.New Zealand’s attack was led by a stunning 33-ball century from Finn Allen, the fastest hundred in T20 World Cup history, as they chased down 170 balls in just 12.5 overs. For Markram, the damage was done early.

“I think you look at the conditions early on and they bowled well in front. The ball didn’t look like it was coming quite, some were stopping at the wicket and some were hitting too low in the bat and they made scoring really difficult and through that the pressure builds and you lose wickets unfortunately,” Markram said.

He credited the Kiwi bowling unit with putting pressure on his team during the power play, where the scoring never flowed. “So, give credit to their bowling unit, obviously with the bat, someone playing an innings like that, you don’t think you’re going to come out on the right side of the score too many times as a fielding team.”South Africa eventually posted 169 for 8, thanks largely to Marko Janssen’s unbeaten 54 off 30 balls and a crucial stand with Tristan Stubbs having slumped to 77 for 5.

Markram felt there was still hope for a break.“Getting to 170 was a huge effort to be fair. Halfway through we really felt like we had smelled it,” he said.That optimism quickly faded when Allen and Tim Seifert got involved in bowling. “But then, like in T20 cricket… (in) the powerplay (they) went off to a flyer and couldn’t protect all the boundaries unfortunately, and yeah they got away and from there it was really difficult to pull it back.”Markram reserved special praise for the openers who killed the contest in the first six overs. “So we give a lot of credit to Finn Allen’s hit, Tim Seifert’s hit for killing the game as early as they did, and yeah unfortunately, that was a bad night for us tonight.”Thinking about what could have been done differently, the skipper suggested that a quicker tactical adjustment with the bat might have helped.“It’s hard to say that now. We’ll think as a group. I think we expected the wicket to play really well.”

It looked pretty good to the eye, so you could probably adapt a little quicker off the bat and go back to the old school approach maybe, set it up and try to work your way up to 190, and maybe you’ll be in the game from there.Despite the disappointment of not reaching another final, Markram stood steadfastly behind his team. “So, yeah, we’ll think as a group. Obviously we’re disappointed with the result, but we’re very proud of this group of guys who played really good cricket throughout this group, and it’s just a really unfortunate evening.”