{"id":680980,"date":"2026-01-07T23:37:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T23:37:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/680980\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T23:37:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T23:37:13","slug":"seven-balls-at-newlands-and-a-reminder-of-what-jason-smith-can-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/680980\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven balls at Newlands and a reminder of what Jason Smith can do"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t think he answered them in one innings; in seven balls,&#8221; Eric Simons, Joburg&#8217;s assistant coach, said. &#8220;He played really well. He hit some crucial boundaries at crucial times and that took the momentum away from us at a time when [the required runrate] was starting to slip to 13s and 14s. But there&#8217;s a lot more to T20 cricket than a few hits. He hits the ball hard, he hits the ball a long way, and he&#8217;s done that a few times this tournament already. But there&#8217;s some way to go still.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#8220;I don&#8217;t think he answered them in one innings; in seven balls,&#8221; Eric Simons, Joburg&#8217;s assistant coach, said.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":680981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4101],"tags":[55796,1406,192480,203870,200524,129341,2196,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-680980","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-2025-26","9":"tag-cricket","10":"tag-icc-mens-t20-world-cup-2026","11":"tag-jason-smith","12":"tag-mi-cape-town","13":"tag-sa20","14":"tag-south-africa","15":"tag-sports","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115856450782420761","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/680981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}