World Cup Cricket: USA runs South Africa close in Super 8 opener – The Boca Raton Tribune-Selambe

Team USA coming off qualification in Lauderhill from the Group Stage in the T20 Cricket World Cup (which happened in Lauderhill) fell to South Africa by 16 runs today. The match held in Antigua was the opener of the Super 8’s.

Despite the loss, the credibility of the USA side is continuing to grow. Lavish praise is being showered on the US effort by much of the international media. During the Group Stage, USA had upset Pakistan and ran world number one India extremely close in a clash that was back-and-forth.

USA had a fierce rally anchored by Andries Gous toward the end of the innings but could not match South Africa’s 194 runs. For his efforts, Gous became the leading run scorer in this World Cup with 182 runs. But what really hurt the USA was losing stand-in skipper Aaron Jones on his fifth ball – Jones did not score a run. Equally damaging was not having Captain Monank Patel. Still the USA almost pulled off another stunner in this tournament.

USA Head Coach Stuart Law said:

Yeah, look, we can sit down and dissect it, but sitting here, again, a proud coach of what we’ve achieved. To get to the Super 8’s was a phenomenal effort, but to then push South Africa, you can see they got nervous towards the back end of their innings. We just lost Harmeet Singh just at the wrong moment there – That was a shame, but there’s lots of things we areas we can improve on. We’ve you can tell the inexperience that we do have particularly against the bigger teams and that’s okay You only get experience by playing and it’s nice that performance is warranted the South African coach coming over to me and saying we’d love to set up reciprocal series. So, it’s another great day. We didn’t get the result, but we showed that we can compete against some of the best players in the world.
Stuart Law, June 19 after USA-South Africa

The USA continue their Super 8 group with a Friday night clash with home standing West Indies in Barbados. Then the USA finish the campaign with a Sunday morning matchup with reigning World Champions England.

The top two in each Super 8 group advance to the World Cup semifinals.