Another major upset was seen in the ICC World Cup 2023 on Tuesday. Netherlands registered its first win by defeating a strong team like South Africa by 38 runs in Dharamsala. After losing the toss and electing to bat first, Netherlands scored 245 runs despite a poor start. In reply, South Africa was all out in 42.5 overs on the score of 207.
Due to rain, the game was reduced to 43-43 overs per innings. Captain Edward played a brilliant inning of 78 runs. Chasing the target of 245, South Africa got its first blow in the form of Quinton de Kock in the eighth over. Then the team’s score was 36 runs.
After that the Netherlands bowlers became dominant and sent four top batsmen to the pavilion within 12 overs. Macro Yansen and David Miller showed some courage, but no batsman could even score a half-century. Miller was out after scoring the maximum of 43 runs.
While the Netherlands bowlers displayed disciplined bowling, the team set a new record in terms of fielding. The players captured many brilliant caps and ultimately defeated a team like South Africa. In the same season, South Africa had scored more than 400 runs against Sri Lanka, but today it was barely able to touch the 200 mark.
Earlier, with the help of Scott Edwards’ captaincy innings, Netherlands scored a challenging score of 245 runs for eight wickets in 43 overs. Kagiso Rabada, Marco Jansen and Lungi Ngidi took advantage of the favorable conditions to reduce Netherlands’ score to 140 for seven in the 34th over. These three fast bowlers took two wickets each.
South African bowlers, however, failed to stop the run flow in the final overs. He gave away 68 runs in the last five overs. Edwards scored unbeaten 78 runs on 69 balls which included 10 fours and one six. After that, the second highest score was of extra runs (32).
Edwards got good support from the lower order batsmen. He made a partnership of 64 runs for the eighth wicket with Reelof van der Merwe (29 runs on 19 balls). Number ten batsman Aryan Dutt contributed 23 unbeaten runs on nine balls.
Rabada dismissed Vikramjit Singh (02) on his first ball of the match, while Yansen showed his opening partner Max O’Dowd (18) to the pavilion after six balls. Rabada trapped star all-rounder Bas de Leede (02) LBW.
In this way, the Netherlands team looked to be in trouble due to losing wickets at regular intervals. Edwards and Van der Merwe, who has played 26 international matches for South Africa, adopted a counter-attacking strategy which proved effective.
Edwards pulled Rabada and hit a six. He scored runs by doing sweep and reverse sweep on spinner Keshav Maharaj. After this, Aryan Dutt also hit three sixes in his short innings.