The biggest difficulty in writing about the Proteas during an ICC world event is the danger of repeating oneself! How many times have we spoken about past failures, and how many more times can we contemplate doing it in the future?

I never really enjoyed media speculation when I was a player because I often felt that journalists and former players who were doing the speculating were not close enough to the team to understand how much effort and hard work was being put into the job. And now here I am, in exactly the same position.

It finally seems as if we are now in a tournament proper, and I think it was obvious how we used the cut-throat nature of our must-win game against Afghanistan to raise our performance.

The Afghanistan team have obviously been one of the major talking points of the tournament, and congratulations to them for having come so far, so quickly.

They have a couple of decent players, but we were fully focused on our own game and we expected it to be hard, which it certainly was when we batted.

It was tough watching the boys losing against India from the sidelines because I was very keen to play, although so was every one else in the squad!

    We lost that game in the last six overs of their innings, when they scored too many runs, and the first six overs of our innings, when we did not build up enough momentum.

    But it is something we have talked about and we will be doing our best to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

The loss against India was tough to take because it is a sin to lose by 14 runs with wickets in hand. It means that we did not pace our innings very well and that is something that we will be working very hard on to correct.

    We started well with the ball but we didn’t capitalise on our start and that was our first mistake.

    We weren’t at our best in the field either and that is something we have worked hard on in training and I am sure we will see an improvement there.

Every cricketer I have ever played with or against would rather win every game than lose a few, but that is impossible.  So, given that every team has to lose from time to time a very good compromise is to lose the games which are not vital!
 

I write this column just over 24 hours before South Africa's opening game of the ICC T20 World Cup and I must confess that my levels of excitement are every bit as high as they were before the IPL final between the Mumbai Indians, for whom I was working, and the Chennai Super Kings.