West Indies had won the toss and elected to field first, with the wicket just been re-laid; it probably was the better decision.

Bosman walks himself out on a wide call

Bosman and Smith opened up the batting for South Africa, and Roach was first man in the West Indies bowling attack. Bosman and Smith were off to a steady start, until Bosman (7) mistook an umpire’s decision of wide for OUT in the 3rd over and walked off, or gloved it and decided to be the better man.

Smith pulls a Homer Simpson… Doh!

The Halcyon Cove Hotel is a 3 star establishment on one of Antigua’s 365 beaches. In fact my room overlooks the pool bar (oh what a wonderful sight!) and is about 80 yards from the beach, my room that is, the bar is about 10 yards. Yes the sand is white as in the postcards and yes, there are palm trees wherever you look.

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.