South Africa v Sri Lanka ODIs: Five reasons why South Africa failed

2) Lack of quality spin bowlers

Aaron Phangiso, Robin Peterson and JP Duminy are not going to send shudders down anybody’s spine, let alone the Sri Lankans.

With batsmen like Dilshan, Sangakkara and Jayawardene who are accomplished players of slow bowling, the South Africans were surely shooting in the dark if they felt that these bowlers were going to trouble batsmen of this class. And this is with all respect to the three bowlers mentioned above.

These Sri Lankans are brought up on a diet of spin, and they were certainly not going to miss out on some easy bread and butter. Phangiso had three wickets to his name in the series, Duminy did one worse and picked up two, and Robin Peterson also managed two solitary wickets in the series.