Bavuma says Proteas have eyes firmly fixed on England after Dutch debacle

England’s pursuit of “freethinking” meets South Africa’s demand for memory loss at the Wankhede Stadium adjacent to Bollywood on Saturday. 

Script writers would salivate at the prospect of delving into the psychological aspects of two characters as intriguing as the South African and English teams. 

The Proteas have mental baggage, which has weighed on them for more than two decades at ICC events. Try as they might, they haven’t been able to shed any of the load and instead have had to make do with explaining how they try to ignore or manage to bear it. 

The weight would have been there anyway, ahead of Saturday’s match against the defending champions, but got a little bit heavier in the aftermath of their unexpected defeat by the Netherlands on Tuesday. 

It’s a match they claim to have left in the past.

“We've had hard conversations as a team, obviously looking at our performances and where things went bad for us from a batting, bowling, even from a fielding point of view,” skipper Temba Bavuma said on Friday.

“We've put that behind us. We’ve obviously got the challenge of England starting and we are preparing to get ourselves in the right mental and physical state, to play our best cricket.”

The proof lies in how they perform on Saturday.

The Proteas believe they can stick with the blueprint that has been developed under Rob Walter in the last nine months and has mostly served them well in that period, whether in earning them the last automatic qualifying spot or during the five-match unbeaten run that includes the come-from-behind series win against Australia and the first two matches of the World Cup. 

“I think it's easy to second-guess yourselves, second-guess your processes and your game. In the last couple of months, we've played a lot of good cricket. So, I think it's (important) not to overlook that and allow one ‘blip’ to override everything that we've done.”

With the bat, due care will be shown in the first 10 overs, allowing partnerships to be created to ensure gradual acceleration through to the 35th over and then an explosion of fury at the back end.

Among the bowlers, the importance of taking wickets regularly is central to the plan, and after Tuesday the absence of extras needs to be emphasised.

When it comes to talk of forgetting what’s happened previously, it sounds better when it comes from the England camp, simply because their players have lived it.

“We’ve moved on from Afghanistan, we can’t change what happened, we’ve trained really well and the focus is entirely on what is ahead,” said England’s captain Jos Buttler. 

He was asked about the last time England and South Africa faced each other at a World Cup match at the Wankhede and described the 2016 T20 encounter as one of the favourite matches of his career.

England successfully chased 230, still the highest target achieved in a T20 World Cup.

It served as one of the first signs of England’s new white ball philosophy and while they went on to lose the final of that tournament, among the players, like Buttler, who were a part of it, it played a significant role in the dominance England have enjoyed in the limited overs formats in the last few years. 

“I think it had a lot of value in terms of where we were going as a team and the direction we wanted to play.”

All the talk from their camp since Sunday has been about playing the way they want to. “We want to commit to the style that we play. And that's always more important than the results. If we can stick to the way that we like to play our cricket and get to the best version of that, we know that that's the best chance we have of getting positive results.”

The return of Ben Stokes, after a muscular injury, will help to reinforce that mindset, as is the presence this week in Mumbai of Brendon McCullum, whose freethinking philosophy was copied by former England captain Eoin Morgan, and was the central tenet of England’s white ball style.