Can we beat New Zealand?

It has been a disappointing start to the World Cup, losing our first two matches in what has been a frustrating tournament to date. Our opening game against West Indies saw us put in a performance that I think we’ll all be thinking about for the next few months.

After a solid start, we just collapsed, and scoring 116 all out in a World Cup game simply isn’t good enough and we all know that. Although we only lost by two wickets, I think our brilliant bowling performance made it even more frustrating as I believe we would have won comfortably if we had scored 30 to 40 more runs.

The game against Australia was a much better performance and Alicia Smith bowled superbly to take three wickets and restrict them to 258 for 4 when at one stage it looked like they may get close to 300.

And when Trisha Chetty, who batted superbly, and I were putting on a great partnership for the second wicket I genuinely thought that we had a chance of making the target.

But Australia are the current World Cup holders for a reason and the spinners came on and tied us down, which put on extra pressure and meant we had to take some risks.

It was frustrating that none of us went onto get a really big score. We needed somebody to have a big innings like Karen Rolton did for Australia if we were to have a chance of winning. I think this event has shown that we need to play more regular, competitive international cricket so that we have a chance of beating the best teams in the world.

With some more experience, we could have got really close to Australia, which considering it is the No. 1 side in the world, would have been an amazing achievement.

Hopefully we can learn from our mistakes and be even more competitive at the World Twenty20 in the summer, but for now we are just focussing on the challenge tomorrow. We know that South Africa has never beaten New Zealand in a women’s ODI match, but records are there to be broken, and the fact we need to win to get through to the Super Six stage is even more important.

Nobody expects us to win, which perhaps means the pressure is off us, but there is pressure from within the team that we want to show the world what we can do.