While Allen and Seifert will receive the majority of the plaudits for their excellent partnership, New Zealand’s bowlers also made a great impact with Matt Henry, Rachin Ravindra and Cole McConchie each picking up two wickets to ensure South Africa’s highly-rated batting lineup were never able to gather much momentum.
Allen praised the Black Caps’ bowlers, believing his job was made much easier courtesy of the plans that were carried out during the Proteas’ innings.
“Well we just hoped (Mitch) Santner would win a toss to start and he did that. So that was the first part done. And then from then onwards it was just, take the bull by the horns. Take the game on, not shy away from any challenge,” Allen continued.
“Like I said earlier, the bowlers certainly did that to start off with. They set the tone for us and taking early wickets on what we thought was going to be a really good batting wicket was extremely important.
“They’ve got an incredibly powerful batting line-up and yeah, look, hats off to the boys. They set it up for us with the bat and yeah, as I said, we didn’t really have a plan, me, and Timmy, just try and be positive and hope for the best.”
