January 30, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
Young players now seeing the perks of playing cricket
Young players now seeing the perks of playing cricket
The ICC put the teams up at the Montecasino Hotel in Sandton. For some of the guys, who are in their first ICC tournament, they were overwhelmed.
They hadn't seen anything like it before. It's a huge five star hotel with a casino and a shopping mall.
The senior players are a bit more used to that kind of treatment, having been to the World Cup, and we've tried to impress on the younger guys that these are the rewards that cricket can bring. A lot of us would never stay at these kind of places if it wasn't for cricket.
I'm not a gambling man myself. I don't mind playing cards but I've worked hard for my money and I wasn't going to waste too much of it in a casino!
The game against Namibia on Saturday was our biggest test yet and although we lost, I felt there were a lot of positives.
They have been playing in the South African domestic league, so this was practically a home game for them.
We played one of the top teams in the tournament and we scored 220, batting first.
Maybe we should have had a few more but it was our first game in Johannesburg and guys took their time and tried to get used to the conditions.
I made 36 before getting out to a soft dismissal. We lost some momentum at that point before Janeiro and Hempy picked it up towards the end. They beat the total with four wickets down.
It was a disappointing scoreline in the end but there were points were I felt if things had gone our way we could have pulled it off. At the end of the day we have to keep things in perspective. It was a practice match and although we wanted to win, that was not the most important thing.
From now on that changes. Every game is like a cup final. We know UAE are a good team but we're ready for them.
On Sunday we had our photoshoot and Gus and Irving gave a media conference at the Sandton Sun Hotel. All 12 teams had to give press conferences over the weekend - another taste for us of the hype that surrounds this tournament. Monday we had a briefing from the ICC's anti-corruption department on match fixing. They talked to us about Hansie Cronje (the former South African captain who was involved in a match fixing scandal) and corruption in the game and gave us advice on what to do if you're contacted by a bookie and different things like that.
It was a real eye opener for all of us.
After that we moved to the hotel in Vanderbijlpark, where we are going to be based for the first round.
We trained at Potchefstroom yesterday and get down to business for our first game today.
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