It was the Herschelle Gibbs and Richard Levi show at Newlands on Sunday as the Cobras’ openers helped the home side win the first leg of their semifinal against the Nashua Titans with ease.

The Titans won the toss and chose to bowl in the blazing Cape Town sunshine and Jacques Rudolph and Henry Davids looked in good touch as they notched up a fine partnership of 45. Johann Louw, however, had other ideas and he sent Rudolph stumps cartwheeling towards the end of the sixth over. He struck again just two balls later to send Davids on his way and leave the Titans looking shaky.

Sahara Park Newlands has long been synonymous with family, friends and entertaining cricket. The opening Standard Bank pro20 between the local Cape Cobras and the Titans from up north was no different.

Despite a sunny day in Cape Town, Newlands cricket ground, as usual, had its own climate. It was rather chilly and quite windy, but that didn’t stop the supporters of coming out to watch the game and when a wicket fell off the first ball of the match, we all knew that we would be set for thrill-a-minute kind of stuff.

It is a wonderful feeling to be in the Standard Bank Pro20 final. We have had a pretty tough season off the field but all credit must go to my team for their efforts.

   Even though we are into the final we won’t be celebrating too much. I will say that we enjoyed the moment after beating the Titans but we need to stay humble because there is still one very important match still to play.

    I must give credit to Jonathan Vandiar and Neil McKenzie for the way they batted against the Titans.

It is not easy to be out of the Standard Bank Pro20 but the guys did not play to their full potential against the Lions and if you are slightly off your game in Pro20 the chances are you are going to get beaten.

    I suppose some people will question if I made the right decision to leave myself out for the Lions match but we actually had four tough decisions to make.

    Faf du Plessis, David Wiese, Roelof van der Merwe and myself were all left out but that is the nature of playing for the Titans.

What a great win for us against the Titans. We probably made it harder for ourselves than it needed to be but I think we deserved to win the match in the end.

    Before the game we would have taken 143 to chase but losing wickets in the middle of our innings put us under pressure.

    What should have been a comfortable run-chase became a bit difficult but all credit must go to Jean Symes and Robbie Frylinck for keeping their heads in that final over.

It’s never nice losing full stop, never mind losing such as tight game. But we made it hard for ourselves and we didn’t deserve to win the match after dropping about a million catches!

    I thought we batted pretty well but we let ourselves down in the field although I thought Faf de Plessis bowled superbly to pick up three wickets.

    We have probably played our worst two matches this season in the MTN40 semi-final and the first game of the Standard Bank Pro20 semi.