After New Zealand's bowlers restricted South Africa to their lowest total of the series, Seifert's half-century made it a one-sided contest
New Zealand 135 for 3 (Seifert 66*, Mitchell 20*, Muthusamy 2-24) beat South Africa 134 for 8 (Hendricks 41, Linde 23*, Milne 2-21, Santner 2-26) by seven wickets
New Zealand will take the advantage into the tri-series final after beating South Africa for the second time in two meetings in the group stage. The two sides will meet again on Saturday, and New Zealand will have one more opportunity to fine-tune when they play Zimbabwe on Thursday. Zimbabwe have already been eliminated.
In a competition where the chasing team have won four out of the five games so far (including this one), New Zealand played the situation to perfection. On a dry Harare surface, they restricted South Africa to their lowest total of the series and then chased it down inside 16 overs with seven wickets in hand. They made batting look relatively easy with an opening stand of 51, the highest powerplay score of the series, 55 for 1, and had the only half-century of the match courtesy of Tim Seifert.
Contrastingly, South Africa struggled to find fluidity or string together partnerships. Their highest was a sixth-wicket stand of 30 off 16 balls between Reeza Hendricks and George Linde, who were also the only two batters to have individual scores over 20. None of their bowlers could keep New Zealand quiet and Gerald Coetzee was particularly expensive. His three overs cost 37 runs while Zakary Foulkes and Adam Milne gave away just 33 runs in seven overs.
