152 Quotes by Graeme Smith

The wicket will probably be quite dry. He's an unknown talent. He's young, he's exuberant, he's really excited about playing for his country and that's good.

The teams are matched up pretty well. If anything, we need to pick it up a step in our ruthlessness on the field. We need to finish things off. We may just get a bit tense, and that comes down to inexperience, playing the best team in the world. I think 1-0 down is disappointing, but it hasn't hurt us and in a lot of ways, I'm very positive about us. As captain, I feel we're very close to hitting the mark ...and we're going to come back hard in Sydney.

Sometimes, when you're batting with an injury, it helps you to focus your mind, and I'm hoping that will be the case. The medical staff would rather I waited until the second Test, but I really want to get out there and play.

South African crowds are going to support us but we also expect them to be dignified and not cross the lines that were crossed in Australia.

Definitely. We're not disappointed with the fact that we got bowled out in the last innings, the disappointing thing for us is that we had opportunities but didn't take them. We always knew that batting last against the two spinners would be difficult but it was in the middle of the game that we lost it.

Coming out of the Test series, a lot of the guys who were here believed going back home we could beat them. We didn't take our chances. We had them under pressure on a number of cases in the Test series and just didn't drive it home.

Coming in to today I felt a lot better about my game. I was more settled and a lot calmer in my head and obviously bowling well does add to your confidence.

As a team we've got to take more risks and he's (Botha) a guy who wants to bowl in tough situations.