The year 2019 was quite a whirlwind for me and things happened quite quickly. By the time we got to the World Cup, I'd only played nine ODIs. I made my debut that January against Pakistan, then played a series against Sri Lanka. Luckily, I put in a few scores and was thrown into situations in those two series where there was quite a bit of pressure and I could show my ability to handle that. So, within the space of a few months, I was on my way to a World Cup.
At that time, I was 30 and I had played professional cricket for seven or eight years already. I was always quite vocal against people who, in previous World Cups, would bring up the choking thing. I was really opposed to that. When I got into the squad, I didn't really feel that pressure because it wasn't really a thing for me. I don't know if the older guys had some scarring from previous World Cups - obviously 2015 - but for me, it wasn't really a thing, and in the team environment, I didn't feel it was a massive thing.
There's so much pressure anyway, and then we lost that first game, against England and the second game, against Bangladesh. Then the pressure really started to ramp up, but not necessarily from the histories of other World Cups, just pressure from being in a World Cup and being zero from two.
I think it was almost a case of poor preparation. We were probably a little bit undercooked as a team. We had some injuries - Anrich Nortje, Dale Steyn. It was bad luck. Within the space of a week, we'd lost two matches and then pressure from outside started coming in. You read it in the press and you see it online and on social media and it starts to really snowball. From the third game, it was do or die already.
Then, the AB story came up - about how he might have come out of retirement to play the World Cup. I was just a side story. By no action of my own, I was in the headlines. From early on, people were asking me if I was going to play the AB role and I was like, "How are you even comparing me to this guy?" I've played nine ODIs and I don't think anyone in world cricket at that stage or since can do what AB was capable of at his prime. I said to myself that I can just do what I can do. I can't engage or indulge myself in those conversations. I almost just laughed it off. It didn't really faze me.
I was lucky in the sense that I had quite a good World Cup, and that put a few things to bed. Maybe if I hadn't had a good campaign, people would have brought that up and said, if AB was there, things could have been different. I felt heartened by the decision made by Faf [du Plessis, then South Africa's captain], because it showed there was faith in me. I was quite happy and grateful that I could contribute well to the team. Obviously, it wasn't a great six weeks for us, but when you go through failures, you learn what not to do.
We got to the New Zealand game - a must-win for us. It was a tight game. Kane Williamson made a hundred but he was caught behind on 76 off Immie [Imran Tahir] and nobody heard that nick. It showed up on the replay and it sort of summed up our tournament: we were always trying to fight from behind. Things felt a bit hurried and all over the place and we just couldn't find our best form probably up until those last games against Sri Lanka and Australia. Then, obviously it was too late.
In a World Cup, you want to play well. You can accept when you play well and you don't win, but we didn't play well. That was quite tough. We played well at stages, but we just didn't do enough to get the results. We also knew JP [Duminy] and Immie were going to retire at the end of the World Cup and we really wanted to give them good memories. That's the reason we showed up in that final match against Australia. We really wanted to give them what they deserve as stalwarts of the ODI team. In a bad campaign, you look for all those little beams of light to hold onto and luckily that was one for us.