South Africa vs Australia Final Match Report: Australia also retained its record of winning every match against South Africa.
Image Credit source: AFP
A beautiful journey went ahead with success achieving another destination. At the same time, another beautiful journey came to an end with tears after reaching the destination. One team created history, the other missed out on creating history. Australia, captained by Meg Lanning, who has already dominated women’s cricket, won the Women’s T20 World Cup title for the sixth time, retaining it. In the final held in Cape Town, Australia prevented hosts South Africa from becoming world champions for the first time by defeating them by 19 runs in front of thousands of fans.
South Africa stopped Australia from a big score by showing their strong performance in bowling and fielding. Now the onus was on the batsmen, but the kind of start that Laura Woolfart and Tajmin Brits had made against England in the semi-finals did not work against Australia. The Star Brits of the semi-finals collapsed in the fifth over itself. The team’s score in Powerplay was only 22 runs for 1 wicket. The pace increased slightly in the next 5 overs but the wickets of Marijan Cap and Captain Sune Luce also fell. Till the 11th over, the score was 55 runs for 3 wickets.
South Africa needed 101 runs in the remaining 9 overs. From here the team’s young star batsmen Laura Woolfart and Chloe Tryon took over the team and gradually increased the pace of the innings. Woolfart, in particular, adopted an attacking approach and scored a total of 29 runs for South Africa in the 13th and 14th overs. With a four in the 15th over, Woolfart completed his half-century in 43 balls, which was his third half-century in the tournament.
Australia’s batting was also not particularly good before this. After the semi-final win against India, captain Meg Lanning had said that the team won despite not playing well in all three departments. Out of this, the performance of the team in the batting department was not good this time also. Except star opener Beth Mooney, no other batsman could make a big contribution.