Our Standard Bank Pro20 match on Wednesday against the Highveld Lions wasn’t a great performance.

I don’t think we really pitched for the game. With all respect to the Lions, the guys thought it was going to be a walk in the park, so in a way it was a good thing that it happened as it did, as it’s brought us back down to earth again.

We didn’t assess the conditions well in the beginning. If you’re three wickets down early on as we were, you’re always going to struggle to get a proper total, but we also played some shots on a wicket that didn’t warrant them.

I would still say that seven out of 10 times we would defend a total of 145 but when the Lions were batting the ball started skidding on a bit and it got easier to bat.

Jacques Rudolph batted very well – he did his job. You need one guy to bat through and get 50 off 40 balls, and then the rest of the guys need to get a strike rate of 130. We had a guy who was batting through while the rest of the guys were going at 100, so there was no acceleration.

Having a guy batting through in any kind of cricket is important. Look at Test cricket, where Hashim Amla did exactly that against India and the rest of the guys played around him. If you do that, you’re going to get big totals. The only thing is that in Test cricket, the guy batting through is batting at a strike rate of 40, whereas the guys around him will be at 50. In Pro20, the guy batting through needs to bat at a strike rate of 100, and the rest of the guys 130! It goes without saying but Pro20 is just a shorter version of Test cricket but the basic principles still apply.

On Wednesday we were 20 runs short but I don’t think the batters were to blame. I thought Ethy Mbhalati (four for 20) was outstanding, considering his first over went for 10, but as a bowler you need to limit the damage and I don’t really think we did that as well as we could have.

Personally, I thought I bowled better against the Lions than I did against the Cobras (when I somehow won the Master Blaster!) but that’s the nature of Pro20. 

Looking ahead, we fly to Kimberley on Saturday to play the Eagles on Sunday afternoon, with the Warriors on the following Sunday in our final game.

After our loss against the Lions, the other teams now have a game on us and there are four sides fighting it out for two spots. Personally I hope the Warriors and the Cobras keep winning but at least our destiny is still in our hands – and that’s not a bad place to be.