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'It was an easy win' - Fans react as South Africa clinch comfortable victory against Sri Lanka in T20 World Cup 2024

The fourth game of the ICC T20 World Cup 2024 was between Sri Lanka and South Africa, in which the Proteas won the match with five wickets.

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Arunima Purohit
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South Africa (Source: The Indian Express)

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The fourth game of the ICC T20 World Cup 2024 was between Sri Lanka and South Africa, in which the Proteas won the match with six wickets. After a terrific bowling by Anrich Nortje, the South African team's batting performance dropped drastically. However, they managed to chase and won their first game of the marquee event. The pitch supported the seam bowlers well. Hence, Nortje claimed four wickets in the first innings. 

On winning the toss, Sri Lanka chose to bat first, but their decision backfired as they could only score 77 runs in 20 overs. Their batting line-up failed massively as the wickets kept falling at regular intervals. The team couldn't support each other and hence, ended up losing wickets. Four batters were dismissed on ducks while the highest score was Kusal Mendis' 19 runs off 30 balls. South Africa's Anrich Nortje finished their batting of Sri Lanka as he claimed four wickets. 

When South Africa came to bat, they were clueless about the pitch and lost some early wickets. Wanindu Hasaranga's terrific bowling pushed the Proteas on their back foot as they lost five wickets and took 16.2 overs to chase a target of 80 runs. Even for South Africa, the highest score of 20 runs was made by Quinton de Kock. Hasaranga on the other hand took two valuable wickets and gave away 22 runs. After struggling a lot, finally, the Proteas won the match. 

'It was a tough one' - Aiden Markram

While the New York pitch is drawing criticism towards itself, South Africa skipper Aiden Markram spoke about the pitch at the presentation. He mentioned the nature of the pitch and how batting was quite difficult on the ground. However, on the brighter note, they won the match and will learn a lot from the pitch.

"The batting was little up and down, probably speaks to quite a tough wicket and luckily we found ways to score on this. It was a tough one from a batting point of view, we try as much as we can to take the pitch out of it, we can take some learnings from it and we are experienced," said Markram at the post-match presentation.

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