The South African Cricket Team has defeated England by 7 wickets in the fifth ODI of the 5 match one day series at Trent Bridge, Nottingham. With this victory, South Africa managed to level the series by 2-2. The English team looked completely off colour in the match. Almost every English batsman threw his wicket away by playing extremely poor shots. The English bowlers also bowled too many loose deliveries and allowed the South African batsmen to play in a dominating fashion.
Earlier, the English skipper won the toss and decided to bat. Jonathan Trott didn’t get fit on time and Jonny Bairstow was included in the side on Trott’s place. Robin Peterson was given the new ball by the South African skipper AB De Villiers and the left arm spinner delivered in the fourth over by trapping Ian Bell in front of the stumps with an arm delivery. Ravi Bopara was promoted in the batting order in the absence of Trott, but, he got out on the second delivery that he faced. Cook added 55 runs with Bairstow for the third wicket, but, the dismissal of Bairstow opened the floodgate. England lost three very quick wickets and the score became 99 for 5. After that, the England innings never got back on track. The wickets kept on falling regularly and the English team got all out on 182. Had Chris Woakes not played some good shots towards the end of the innings, England would have struggled to get past 150.
South Africa was off to a disastrous start in reply. Three wickets were down at the score of just 14 runs. But, AB De Villiers played the captain’s knock and put up a match winning partnership of 172 runs with Hashim Amla for the fourth wicket to see his team home. De Villiers played an unbeaten knock of 75, while, Amla remained not out on 97. Amla was declared the man of the match as well as the man of the series.