An appreciative crowd of around 8000 people packed out the Buffalo Park Cricket Stadium to roar the Proteas to a crushing 3-0 series win over Bangladesh in East London on Sunday afternoon.
It was the perfect day with ideal conditions for cricket, and the Proteas duly responded in kind to notch up their biggest total of the one-day series and highest ever ODI score at the ground as Bangladesh were completely dominated.
With three changes to the team that had won the second one-day, including debuts for Aiden Markram and Wiaan Mulder and resting Hashim Amla with Temba Bavuma taking his place, it was expected to be a bit more of a challenge for the side as they looked to gel.
However all three players that came in contributed to the result, with Markram especially impressive scoring 66, claiming 2/18 with the ball and taking a sharp catch in the slips in a great all round performance.
In all it contributed to a very enjoyable time in the city for the Proteas, with man-of-the-series Quinton de Kock saying he hoped to be back soon.
“It is always nice to be back in East London, there are good people here, it is a great place to be on the ocean, it is a beautiful part of South Africa and it is one of my favourite places to travel,” said De Kock.
“It is a really nice wicket to play on and it is great to play in front of an awesome crowd so hopefully we can play a couple more games here in the near future.”
East London is often starved of international cricket, so it was wonderful to see the response of the locals who turned out in their numbers to see the match and hopefully Cricket South Africa will take notice of the passion shown and bring more major internationals to the city.
“We would like to thank the spectators who filled the stadium,” said Border Cricket CEO Thando Booi.
“The atmosphere and cheering crowds was wonderful which was witnessed by millions of viewers across the country and continent.
“We hope that Buffalo Park will receive more international matches as we believe that we have proved that we are capable of attracting large crowds.”
With the Proteas now moving on to the two-match T20 series against Bangladesh, they will be looking to finish the tour on a high and sweep the visitors 7-0 across all formats.
Having comfortably won every match so far the team will be confident, however the T20 game is always a lot more unpredictable and thus could be a much harder fought battle.
“Obviously we want to finish off the Bangladesh tour quite strong,” admitted De Kock.
“I think it’s going to be a tough competition in the shorter format, I think the Bangladeshis are going to come back strong, especially in the shorter format which I think they are very good at.
“They have some good players who do very well in the IPL so we are going to have to keep our eye out for them and see what happens.
“But we will hopefully take the series win there before getting back to franchise cricket.”
The Proteas take on Bangladesh in the first T20 international at the Mangaung Oval in Bloemfontein on Thursday night before finishing the tour with the second T20 match at Senwes Park in Potchefstroom on Sunday afternoon.