To lose a home series is massively disappointing but I honestly still have reason to feel quite excited about the challenges that lie ahead for this one-day team and our potential to once again become the number ranked team in the world.

All of the new players have now had a significant taste of international cricket and none of them looked out of place or out of their depth which will add both variety and depth to the Proteas squad as we build towards the next World Cup in 15 months time. Alviro also coped brilliantly with the positional change from opener to number five so that means even more depth and options.

The challenge is there for us to move forward and make things work with just around 30 more ODIs until our first game in the 2011 World Cup.

As a team you can often learn the most from the tough times – when you’re winning it’s easy to take it for granted – so we have to learn from our mistakes. England came here and managed to put a lot of their ideas into play and ultimately they played well and deserved their series victory.

Hopefully, in 12 months time, we can look back at this period as the start of us getting our one-day cricket back to where it belongs.

England’s one-day cricket has definitely improved. They have had the wood over us recently and played better one-day cricket than us. They seem to have decided on a style of play that suits them which is crucial in one-day cricket.

Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower have surrounded themselves with players they feel that they can back and they deserve credit for the way they have performed. The different challenges for all of us now is going to be how to adapt for the next World Cup on the sub-continent.

I am confident in the group of players that we have. We have had one or two players who are carrying injuries who will come back into the group and who will make us even stronger. Someone like Jacques Kallis offers us a lot more options within the squad but, at the same time, it has been encouraging to see other players come in who I really believe can offer something in the future.

Alviro and Ryan McLaren can definitely take their international one-day careers forward. Having said that, I think some of our players have suffered a bit of a knock in terms of their own performances. They will go and work on their skills and come back better players.

Our next one-day challenge is India, which is an important tour for us in terms of the one-day format, and hopefully everyone will work on their skills and we will come back a better unit.