By Vinnie Barnes

Everybody was suffering on Sunday after a horrible defeat and those who could escaped back home that evening while others had to wait until Monday morning to catch a flight home for a 24 hour break.

Poor old Ryan McLaren was in for a shock when he was told that there were only three flights per week between PE and Bloem – luckily one of them was on Monday morning.

Naturally we chatted about the game on Sunday but there will be a fuller, more intense debrief on Tuesday when we all get back together again in Durban to prepare for the final ODI on Friday. There is still a share of the series up for grabs and I can absolutely assure everybody that the players will have the intensity of desperate men by the time that game starts.

We misread conditions at St.George’s Park. We made too many assumptions about the pitch and, perhaps, about the opposition and we didn’t give ourselves enough time to assess the situation and see if the pitch was behaving as we thought it would.

But we showed our potential on Friday night in Cape Town and we know what this team is capable of and how good it can become. We messed it up on Sunday and that hurts like hell, but we’ll make sure those mistakes aren’t made again.

I can’t remember having as many bowlers and as much depth to work with as I have now. Instead of three or four seamers and a spinner we’ve got five or six fast bowlers and three spinners, including J-P, all pushing for places in the XI.

‘Lopsy’ Tsotsobe has been working unbelievably hard on his game and I feel sorry for him that he hasn’t got a game yet, but he is very close and he knows that. At least he also knows that his game is improving and going forward, he isn’t just treading water or even regressing as some older players can do when they are reserves in a squad.

One of the inevitable plus points to come out of this series will be yet another reminder to players and supporters alike of the value and class that Jacques Kallis brings to every Proteas XI he steps into. From time to time we all take his runs, wickets and catches for granted and it’s only when he’s not there that we remember his greatness.

Consistently successful teams are not built overnight and they have to lose a few games along the way in order to become a winning team. It’s not a great feeling, especially when you lose by such a large margin, but we still have the chance to redeem ourselves with victory in Durban and there is no lack of ambition to do exactly that.