South Africa’s captain Dean Elgar said he couldn’t be prouder of his team after they beat India by seven wickets in the third test at Newlands in Cape Town on Friday.
“I’m pretty elated,” he smiled after the Proteas took the series 2-1 after comeback victories at the Wanderers and Newlands after losing the first match in Centurion.
Asked what turned the series around, Elgar said: “I think the challenges we faced and the characters we have in the group. You’ve got to have immense characters to make it happen. The way our bowling group operated throughout the series, and particularly in the last two games, has been brilliant.”
Elgar admitted that he threw down a challenge to his players after Centurion and he was delighted with their response. “We’ve got a young talented group. The experience isn’t there but we’re gaining it. It was great to see how a group that doesn’t have the repertoire or big names can gel together and play as a unit. I don’t want to pick out names because everyone has made contributions at vital moments in the series.”
Asked about his no-nonsense approach as captain, Elgar said: “If you want to operate effectively in a high-performance environment you’ve got to have some tough chats. I’ve got an old-school mentality with a new-school twist. I laid down some challenges to a lot of senior players as well to stand up and respond and it was brilliant to see them do that. It’s one of the toughest tasks as a captain to get buy-in from everyone and they responded brilliantly.”
Elgar said he wasn’t getting carried away by the victory. “I’m already thinking about the next test series and I know we’re a long way from being the finished article. There are a lot of positives going into the next series, but there are some negatives that we have to hit on the head. In order to grow we have to meet those challenges,” he concluded.
After saying that he didn’t want to single out individuals for praise, Elgar was urged to give his opinion of Keegan Petersen whose three half-centuries won him the man of the series award as well as the match award in Cape Town.
“He’s been brilliant, particularly the way he responded after the first game. I’ve played a lot of domestic cricket against him and I’ve always known he’s a good player. I think he’s gone into a great player mould now. There’s room for improvement of course, but I think the world’s his oyster at the moment.”
India captain Virat Kohli admitted that South Africa deserved to win the hard-fought series. “Obviously I’m very disappointed. We know how far we’ve come as a team and the fact that we’ve come here and people expect us to beat the Proteas in their own conditions is testimony to what we’ve done in the past.
“I’m not going to say that we’ve beaten Australia and England recently; that doesn’t guarantee other results; we’ve got to come here and play hard cricket and we haven’t done that in the last two tests.”
Kohli said that, after a good win in Centurion, his team hadn’t maintained their focus. “South Africa were much more clinical in the crunch moments in the second and third tests and, to be honest, there were lapses of concentration by us at times which cost us key moments and they were able to seize control of them.”
Explaining further, he said that the key was for his team to capitalise on the moments when they had control. “When we have done that, particularly playing away, we have won test matches, but when we haven’t, and lost our concentration for even periods of 45 minutes or an hour, we have lost matches.”
He praised his team’s bowlers, saying they were not the problem. “The bowlers bowled incredibly well but South Africa were better in being able to apply pressure on us for longer periods of time. The batting has to be looked into. Having collapses like we have had is not a good thing and that’s something we need to analyse and correct moving forward.”