South Africa faced another knockout stage exit as they lost to New Zealand. However, South Africa head coach Shukri Conrad refused to say it was a choke.

“I don’t know if tonight was a choke. I thought it was a bloody walloping. In order for you to choke, you must have had a sniff in the game. We didn’t have a sniff. In South Africa, we’d say we ‘got moered’. Tonight, we got a proper ‘snotklap’ — that’s an Afrikaans word for a real hiding, a smack you don’t see coming. That’s what it felt like,” said Conrad.

He further stated that New Zealand had outplayed them in all departments.

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“I thought New Zealand were excellent. They exploited the conditions really well, especially with their spinners up front. We never got out of the blocks,” he said. “We chose a really bad night to have an off day. Maybe it would have been nice to win the toss, but that’s no excuse. We didn’t put up anything close to a competitive score.”

“There’s always something you can point to… playing all our games in Ahmedabad, coming to a new state… but that’s not why we lost,” he said. “They strangled us early, never allowed us momentum and every time we tried to rebuild, they shut the door. We weren’t good enough and they were excellent.”

“We did so many special things in this tournament. I’m incredibly proud of these guys. Not many people gave us a chance of making the semifinals when we left home, given our form before the World Cup. But that’s no consolation right now. You get judged on World Cups and winning them. The guys are hurting, as they should be. But we played some exceptional cricket through this campaign,” Shukri Conrad concluded.