We need to play really good cricket to beat Pakistan – AB de Villiers

AB de Villiers, South Africa’s One Day International (ODI) skipper, is confident about doing well in the remainder of the five-match series against Pakistan but understands that his side will have to play good cricket to beat Misbah-ul-Haq and company.

The Proteas dismantled the visitors in the opening match of the series at Bloemfontein by a massive margin of 125 runs and are currently leading the series 1-0, with the second encounter scheduled to be played today at Centurion.

Prior to that, South Africa had comprehensively won the Test series, winning all the three matches at Johannesburg, Cape Town and Centurion respectively. However, Pakistan bounced back in the T20s and one the only match played in an emphatic margin.

While speaking to reporters about today’s fixture, the home team’s skipper warned his side against complacency and admitted that Pakistan are a very dangerous team when it comes to the shorter formats of the game.

The wicketkeeper/batsman is expecting his side to carry on with the momentum they gained at Bloemfontein and go 2-0 up today.

“Its a massive series this for us and we know there is still 4 massive games coming for us.
We still got to play really good cricket to win this series,” the captain said. “We always get a good crowd behind us at Super Sports Park. If we play good cricket I’m fully confident that we will come on top.”

De Villiers wants his team to show extreme professionalism and take every game seriously. The hard-hitting middle-order batsman, who recently resigned from the T20 captaincy, revealed that the Proteas are working extremely hard under the coaching of Gary Kirsten, who is also a former South African cricketer.

He added, “Consistency in the last year has been very poor and it is something we want to improve on. Consistency for the public is not the same as it for us. For us, it’s in things like the way we train as well and now we are consistently good things there as well. I believe we’re training more consistently these days now with Gary as head coach.”

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Posted by Yasir Hashmi on Mar 15 2013. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.