Sport24.co.za | ‘Mission accomplished’ for Ottis Gibson and Proteas
Cape Town – The 3-0 scoreline in the Test series against Pakistan gave Proteas coach Ottis Gibson a result to celebrate, but he was also as thrilled about how his team had checked all the boxes in bringing up that sweep.
“We did exactly what we set out to do,” Gibson was quoted as saying in ESPNcricinfo.
“We wanted to play four fast bowlers, and the way we played, the pitches suited four fast bowlers. The four fast bowlers did a fantastic job. Batsmen struggled for runs, but they still scored, we got two hundreds in the series, and all in all, mission accomplished.”
South Africa closed the series with a 107-run win in the third Test on Monday as their bowlers took seven wickets in the morning session to bowl out Pakistan.
This was a series dominated by the bowlers: Duanne Olivier, the Player of the Series, picked up 24 wickets, while Kagiso Rabada (17), Dale Steyn (12) and Vernon Philander (6) combined with him to make for a potent pace attack.
For the visitors, Mohammad Amir picked up 12 wickets, while Shaheen Shah Afridi had nine in two games and Faheem Ashraf took six in his only Test.
On tricky surfaces to bat, only two batsmen got hundreds, and given the situation, Gibson was all praise for their efforts.
“I keep saying to the batters (that) when the wickets are like this, you don’t need to score 500,” he explained.
“If we get 262 in the first innings, with our four fast bowlers on a fast bouncy track that’s a great score, because we know that we can knock a team over for under that, which we did.
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“To be fair to the guys in the dressing room, especially the batters, they’ve bought into what I’ve been saying. To score Test match runs has always been difficult, but we’ve been seen that in some of the pitches we’ve played on, as much as people have said how difficult they were, when you’ve applied yourself and you took a few blows, you got your reward,” said Gibson
“Faf (du Plessis) got a brilliant hundred in Cape Town and Quinton (de Kock) got a special hundred here. It’s not like the wickets were minefields, you had to work a little bit harder to score runs, and when you did, what a good feeling it was.”