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The Kemp and Pietersen show
11/02/2005 07:49 - (SA)
The one-day series between South Africa and England has been dominated by the big hitting of Justin Kemp and Kevin Pietersen. The two of them has the ability to change the course of a game within a space of a few overs.
Their ability to hit effortless boundaries makes it very difficult to contain them.
The South African team must still work out a strategy to combat Pietersen and up to now he has been dominating the South African bowling attack.
The area that he has scored freely in was always the leg side and he favours the shots that he plays through that region.
I am sure the South African team are working on a strategy to restrict him and thankfully he does not have Andrew Flintoff in the side to help him destroy the Proteas attack.
It would be interesting to see when Flintoff returns to the side how the two of them will combine in the one day format.
The one thing that came through during this one-day series was the emergence of a big-hitting Pietersen and what a difference did he make to the English batting line-up.
Justin Kemp finally showed us that he could destroy international bowling line-ups the way he does it in the domestic one-day scene.
He has the ability to make the one-day team on his batting alone. His bowling is not up to international standard yet and should be used in four or five over spells until it is good enough for him to be considered for a full spell of 10 overs.
There is a lot to work on from a bowling point of view but just keep hitting the ball the way you do and entertain us.
Kemp and Pietersen command and dominate the pitch when they bat and they impose themselves on the helpless bowlers.
Struggling to contain Pietersen
The South African bowlers are struggling to contain Pietersen at the end of their innings and it shows us that our death bowling is poor and our lengths that we bowl to him should be full and at off stump or just outside off stump.
Any length ball will disappear and the English made the same mistake when they bowled to Kemp.
These players normally give you a chance or two and even a half chance should be snapped up because they will make you pay for missed chances.
The South Africans nearly paid the price when Boucher missed a chance to stump Pietersen of Boje in the ODI in East London when he was on 15 and ended up scoring a century.
The return to form of Graeme Smith does help the team to get off to better starts and thus give players like Gibbs and Kemp the opportunity to play their natural attacking game.
It was clear in Test matches when Smith was struggling to score runs that the rest of the batting order felt the pressure with the early wickets that went down.
Lets hope the good form of everyone continues and Kemp can secure a victory in the one-day series with some more scintillating batting.
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