David Miller did not want to ‘make any excuses’, but he admitted that it wasn’t an ideal situation to travel back and forth between Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates for the Champions Trophy fixtures.
The South African team left for Dubai from Karachi on Sunday afternoon and was back in Lahore on Monday for the semifinals against New Zealand. “It’s only an hour and 40 minutes flight. But the fact that we had to fly out after the game early in the morning and we were in Dubai before coming [to Lahore] at seven in the morning … it doesn’t make it nice,” Miller said.
Despite him scoring an unbeaten century, South Africa suffered a 50-run defeat against New Zealand and crashed out of the tournament. But Miller said that it wasn’t ideal to travel so much in such a short span of time.
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“It’s not that we flew five hours and we had time to recover and regroup, but it wasn’t an ideal situation, to be honest,” he said.
In an ideal situation, he would have wanted to reach the final and face India in what would have been a ‘rematch’ of last year’s T20 World Cup final, where South Africa suffered a narrow defeat.
And on Sunday, when New Zealand plays India in the summit clash in Dubai, the South African big-hitter will be rooting for the former.