Yusuf Pathan shines as http://www.senore.com/Cricket/South-Africa-c757
India defeated South Africa in a thrilling encounter in the third match of the five-match One Day International (ODI) series. The match was played at Newlands, Cape Town in South Africa.
The toss was won by the host team’s captain Graeme Smith, who elected to bat first. The wicket looked flat but it was slow and low, due to which the spinners caused difficulties to the Proteas.
The start wasn’t a good one for Smith and his team as they kept on losing wickets at regular intervals. Hashim Amla, http://www.senore.com/Cricket/AB-de-Villiers-c887 and Colin Ingram got starts but failed to capitalize.
The major disappointment was Smith though, as he was well set before playing a rash shot to be dismissed at a crucial stage. Smith was out in the 24th over after he scored 43 runs off 79 balls.
He tried to sweep the ball from way outside the off-stump and only managed a top-edge, which was held neatly by http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Virat-Kohli-c95424 who ran-in from the slip cordon to take the catch.
After the loss of Smith’s wicket, the team was struggling at 90 for 4. This brought the debutant http://www.senore.com/Cricket/JP-Duminy-c1742. The pair played very sensibly as they didn’t take too many risks and rotated the strike continuously.
They took the total to 200 with a 110-run partnership. Plessis scored 60 runs in his debut innings before he got out in the third power-play. Duminy was also not able to take advantage of the final power-play and was cleaned-up by Zaheer Khan.
The final power-play proved to be terrible for the home team as they lost 4 wickets for just 25 runs. At one stage, the team looked to amass more than 250 runs but the controlled spell from Zaheer Khan in the death overs saw the Proteas all out for 220 runs.
The conditions were not the best for batting and that caused some problems for the Indian batsmen. The visitors opened the innings with Rohit Sharma as Sachin Tendulkar was ruled out of the series due to a hamstring-injury.
India lost their top-five batsmen for just 93 runs and things looked very grim for them at that stage. However, Suresh Raina and Yusuf Pathan took the team out of trouble and scored a 75-run partnership for the sixth wicket.
Pathan was out after scoring 59 runs off 50 balls whereas Raina scored 37 runs. Harbhajan Singh guided his team to victory with a cameo of 23 runs. The target was chased in the 49th over with 10 balls remaining in the match.
http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Johan-Botha-c67173 was disappointing for his team as he gave away too many runs on a wicket
that had support for the spinners.
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