Captain Laura Wolvaardt’s brisk 60 off 47 balls and Tazmin Brits’ unbeaten 55 off 42 hurtled South Africa to 125 without loss in just 14.5 overs on Friday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It enabled the Proteas to reach their revised target of 121 with 5.1 overs to spare as they rattled up a fourth successive win.<\/p>\n
Sri Lanka opted to bat first and were 2-46 after 12 overs when rain stopped play for more than five hours.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Play resumed just before the cut-off time and the match was reduced to 20 overs per side. Sri Lanka added 59 runs in their eight overs to end up at 7-105.<\/p>\n
“Very relieved we got a game in the end,” Wolvaardt said. “It was frustrating sitting out for four or five hours but we’re happy with the two points.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We just treated it as a normal T20 game and wanted to get ahead of the game as soon as we could and not leave it late.”<\/p>\n
South Africa rose to second in the eight-team standings, a point behind Australia, who have already qualified for the last-four.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Sri Lanka have yet to register a win, with just two points from two rain-abandoned games against Australia and New Zealand.<\/p>\n
Of the eight matches in Colombo so far, three have been rained out, and Sri Lanka-South Africa was almost the fourth.<\/p>\n
Before the rain, Sri Lanka’s Vishmi Gunaratne had been struck on the knee while taking a single and was taken off on a stretcher.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At least, the delay gave her time to recover, and she returned to top-scored with 34 before falling on the final ball.<\/p>\n
Fast bowler Masabata Klaas showed impressive swing to take both wickets before the rain but couldn’t bowl after the resumption because of the revised rules under the DLS method.<\/p>\n
In the chase, Wolvaardt and Brits were aggressive against the seamers and used their feet well against the spinners as they smashed 12 boundaries. Brits added two sixes.<\/p>\n
The Sri Lanka bowlers found it difficult to grip the wet ball and Brits hit the winning runs by smashing Piumi Wathsala for a six over mid-wicket, which also brought up her half-century after two successive ducks.<\/p>\n
“We have two more games, we want to play well and win those and finish as high as possible,” Sri Lanka skipper Chamari Athapaththu said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The ball was too hard to grip, especially for the spinners, and we are dependent on spin, so we struggled.”<\/p>\n
On Saturday, winless Pakistan play New Zealand in Colombo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Captain Laura Wolvaardt’s brisk 60 off 47 balls and Tazmin Brits’ unbeaten 55 off 42 hurtled South Africa…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":["post-220989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}