T20 World Cup 2026 – Shukri Conrad hopes to ‘expose India under pressure’

“The first half of the group stage was the scary bit for me. Now it’s the excitement,” Conrad said in Ahmedabad. “Tournament cricket is almost three parts. You have to find a way to just get out of that group stage. So we did that. Now you look and you say, right, we’ve got India first and then the West Indies with some of the most entertaining players in the world and that excites me.”

South Africa will conclude the Super Eight against neighboring Zimbabwe, by which time their fate may already be decided, so the next five days in Ahmedabad will be the most intense. A packed crowd is expected on Sunday, more than double South Africa’s biggest ever after almost 55,000 people turned out to watch their game against New Zealand at the same venue, and the game will be played on a black-clay pitch, a slower surface that can bring the spinners into play.

Combine these factors and it could mean that South Africa are the team under the pump, but Conrad casually returned some of the pressure to their hosts. “Pressure is a big thing, but it’s pressure for us as well as them,” he said. “I think we all talk about the pressure of playing against the top team, but we’re not quite aware of the pressure they’re under. I for one don’t suggest that a guy who has three ducks in his last three games is under pressure for his place in his team. No.”

The player Conrad is referring to is Abhishek Sharma, who is yet to score a run and also missed India’s second match of the tournament due to illness. He has scored no runs so far and has been dismissed by off-spinners twice in three matches, but South Africa’s team only has two left-arm spinners in the first-choice attack. This explains why both Aiden Markram, who bowls more than part-time offs, and Tristan Stubbs, whose offs are part-time, spent significant amounts of time bowling in the nets on Friday.

Either they expect to introduce a big shift or it is South Africa playing mind games against an Indian line-up in which at least four of the top six are left-handers. “The games can be overhyped. I’m not a big fan of that,” Conrad said. “Sometimes the wickets are so good that they take the games out of the equation. If there’s something on the wicket and there’s a bit of spin, then the game can be there for the off-spinner against the left-armer. Maybe the angle you create sometimes. Generally I think it’s a bit overrated on really good wickets.”

And while there have only been seven first-innings totals over 200 in a 40-match group stage, Conrad believes the surfaces are “slightly better” than they were when South Africa toured India late last year. So why didn’t bigger totals – and especially the 300 everyone was talking about before the tournament – come? It’s that p-word again. “The pressure of the World Cup,” Conrad said. “Before the World Cup, people talked about scoring 300-plus and all sorts of things, but generally with World Cups there’s a lot more at stake. In bilaterals, guys come in and they play with a lot more gay abandon, but World Cups bring a definite different type of pressure.”

For a team like India, also smothered by messages about repeating history and encouraged to keep the cup at every turn, that kind of pressure can take its toll and South Africa knows it. “There’s so much scrutiny, especially on a side like India. They’re going to be under a lot of pressure to make the semi-finals and of course go on and make the finals,” Conrad said. “Hopefully we can expose them and make them vulnerable under that pressure.”

At the same time, Conrad understands how capable India are of giving it right back, with a bowling attack led by Jasprit Bumrah and Varun Chakravarthy and a line-out arguably stronger than any South Africa have faced so far. “They like to hit sixes. They like to put you under pressure from the first ball, so if we can hit some early shots with the ball and just withstand that early onslaught with the bat, then that will go a long way in getting us the right result,” he said.

Ishan Kishan has hit the joint-most sixes at the tournament so far – 11 – while Ryan Rickelton comes in eighth with eight, followed by Hardik Pandya with seven. Big hits are just one of the things South Africa are ready for, having experienced it when they visited India late last year for an all-format tour. Although they lost the T20I series 3-1, Conrad used it as a recce and is ready to show what his team has learned.

“That tour gave us a very good insight into what we could be up against. That tour prepared us very well in terms of the hostility, the fervor that builds around Sunday where we could have 130,000 people in the stadium and they’re going to be in blue,” he said. “But Sunday is just one of the few games we have to win to get through, and we are as well prepared as we can be.”