Heinrich Klaasen, the captain, was ‘hurting’ from the fact that his team Orcas, the runners-up of the inaugural season of MLC, had crashed out of the tournament with a game to go as well. Leading for the first time in a T20 league away from South Africa, he was not at his best at times. While South Africa recently faced a defeat to India in te T20 World Cup final, he was seemingly invested in the Orcas’ cause as well.

“Obviously we are done, we’re out of the tournament. We didn’t play our best cricket through the whole tournament, which is disappointing. And yeah, you can see it on the guys faces, its not a nice feeling to be knocked out of the tournament. At least you wanted a chance going into the last game. So at this moment, you can see that we are hurting,” said Klaasen after his side’s six-wicket defeat against the San Francisco Unicorns.

After qualifying for the top 4 with a match to go in the inaugural season to now being ousted of the top 4 with a game to go in their second, the Orcas have failed to do well this season. The inaugural MLC season presented an important moment in Klaasen’s prolific T20 career in 2023 as well. While Klaasen stood third on the run charts last season, he had a poor season this year with a tally of just 93 in five innings. To make matters worse, Quinton de Kock also failed to match the highs of the last season.

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“The scores might look like we lost big but if we could have got 20 more runs in a lot of our games – 15 to 20 more runs – the results would have been a lot different as well. And that’s something that we got right last year. Batters scored a little bit more runs that also obviously helped. I think our bowling unit has been fantastic. They haven’t had the runs to really bowl. So that was the difficult part for them though, I’m very proud of the bowling unit. But the batting unit left a lot of runs out there. And that’s a big difference in this tournament than last season,” he added.

“I think the message was quite clear, we were just searching for someone that was in form and that can help either Ryan or Quiny up front and we lacked in the middle. So we got Quiny to drop down a little bit for a little bit more experience. It is difficult when guys don’t score and you always will chop and change. You will never really have a guy to bat seven innings and don’t score runs. There’s a lot of guys in the shed that also have opportunities and unfortunately those guys also didn’t use it and I didn’t score runs as well. So it makes life a lot harder, especially in team selections and that’s why you have to chop and change somewhere else to counter-balance,” Heinrich Klaasen again shared.

However, Nauman Anwar, the former Pakistan batter, was a reliable resource for the team at the top of the order last season but he failed to step up this year, averaging just four in three innings as well. The Orcas shuffled around USA World Cup hero Aaron Jones in the top-three but he couldn’t do well either in the opportunities he was given with.

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“There’s a lot to play for individually. So you almost just target the individuals a little bit more and say there’s an opportunity for you to actually make a play for your career. Yeah, so they can be a little bit more selfish and express their own skills rather than to play as a team, if that makes sense. So it’s still a lot to play for the individuals and through that you will probably get good results hopefully,” he further added.

“We are a very proud franchise. We played the final last year. So there’s a lot to play for. For us, the owners put a lot of effort into the team and we still have to give something back. So we still have one game to at least try to get a win and play some good cricket. So that’s something that you can try to just chat to the guys about. And we are still in a fortunate position that you can play cricket, there’s a million people out there that want to be in your position as well. So you can’t take it for granted. And you still have to show up and do your job. And hopefully we can just get one win in our last game,” Heinrich Klaasen concluded.