In the end moments, David Miller’s brilliant knock saved South Africa from the disastrous loss. They defeated Netherlands by 4 wickets.
Both the teams registered victory in their last encounters. The Proteas got a cheeky win against Sri Lanka whereas the Dutch team got a close win against the Nepal team.
South Africa, after winning the toss, opted to bowl first.
Netherlands scored 103/9 in 20 overs and in reply South Africa posted 106/6 in 18.5 overs.
A pathetic batting performance shown by the Dutch batters as they were unable to stand in the pitch. Sybrand Engelbrecht was the highest scorer from the side with 40 runs, but for this he played 45 balls and had a strike rate of 88.89. He hit 2 fours and a six in his knock.
He got good support from Logan van Beek (23 runs) as both of them added 54 runs for the 7th wicket. Due to their contribution, the team got par the 100 mark on the board.
The Proteas bowlers once again showed great discipline. Their perfect line and length created immense pressure on the batters out there. Ottneil Baartmen performed his career best performance after grabbing 4 wickets in his 4 overs by giving away only 11 runs. The other pacers Marco Jansen and Anrich Nortje supported him well from the other end and both of them took 2 wickets each.
In the chase, the Proteas batters also struggled at the start as they lost 4 wickets in just 12 runs on the board. Then after a brilliant partnership of 65 runs created between Tristan Stubbs and Miller. Miller played the anchor role and scored an unbeaten 59 runs in 51 balls where he hit 3 fours and 4 sixes.
Stubbs scored 33 runs in 37 balls. After the dismissal of Stubbs, Miller got more aggressive as earlier he almost ran a ball and got him a great win.
A highly commendable job done by the Dutch bowlers as they made it hard for the batters to score easy runs. Vivian Kingma and Logan van Beek got 2 wickets each while Bas de Leede got one wicket.