When Marco Jansen walked out to bat at the Wankhede Stadium on a hot and humid Saturday afternoon, he asked Heinrich Klaasen, “why are you complaining?”
By then, Klaasen had batted for more than an hour and was finding it difficult to continue in those conditions. As he soaked it in, Jansen, too, realised why Klaasen was complaining.
“He was 81 or something and I knew the hard work he did to get there. I told him, you are not going to walk off this ground until you get your hundred. You can do whatever you want after getting there,” Jansen said.
It was Klaasen and Jansen’s blitzkrieg in the last 10 overs that guided South Africa to 399 for seven - the highest-ever ODI total against England and the second-highest at the venue.
“By the end of the innings, I knew what he was talking about; it was tough out there. But I am not going to allow him to work that hard and not get to the century. It was just a matter of 2-3 shots! Luckily he listened to me. I didn’t think he was going to do but he did. I knew how physically tough it was; I am very happy that he got his hundred,” Jansen told reporters after the match.
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While Klaasen hogged the limelight with a ton, Jansen stamped his class with a blistering 42-ball 75, and the youngster banked on his experience as an ‘opener.’ “When I grew up, I opened the batting. So for me, I enjoy batting a lot. I might not be technically as pleasing to the eye as other guys, but I love batting, and I try to work very hard on it,” Jansen said.
When he joined Klaasen at the crease, the latter told him to bat freely. “We knew it was not that bad a wicket. Klaasen just said - ‘have good options and plans’. We never thought that we were going to get to 400. The plan was to get around 320-350,” Jansen said.
The left-arm pacer, who also claimed a couple of wickets, said that despite putting up a tall total, South Africa did not want to rest on its laurels. “We knew that they were going to come hard, but since the wicket was good, we thought we had to stick to our plans and try and force them to make a mistake.
“They are very good stroke makers, and we knew that if we were going to miss our mark they were going to put us all over the park,” Jansen added.
In the end, efforts paid off as South Africa not only handed a heavy defeat to England but also improved its Net Run Rate ahead of Tuesday’s fixture against Bangladesh.
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