A stuttering campaign with the bat came to a painful conclusion for the Proteas at The Oval on Thursday as they were knocked out of the T20 World Cup in a 40-run loss to England.Chasing 170 in the semifinal, in front of a partisan home ground, the Proteas struggled to get up to the required run rate, and lost wickets at regular intervals. They finished on 129/8 and there will be plenty of questions for a batting unit that came into the tournament looking good on paper. The Proteas never lived up to their stated desire to play more boldly and as a result lacked fluency.Captain Laura Wolvaardt, so prodigious at World Cups, had her worst tournament for many years and suffered another failure on Thursday making just 17 in a competition in which her highest score of 45 came against the Netherlands.At the Oval, she tried to hit her way back into form and the trio of fours suggested that may be the case. However, having struck the previous delivery over mid-on, she tried the same shot against left-arm slow bowler Linsey Smith but didn’t get the necessary elevation, allowing Sophie Ecclestone to take a good diving catch at mid-on.Tazmin Brits top scored with 51 for the Proteas, but hers was another ugly innings in which she hit six fours but faced far too many dot balls, putting herself and her teammates under too much pressure. As happened previously against Australia and Pakistan, the lower half of the batting fell to pieces, gifting England a comfortable and celebratory last half an hour. They will head to Lord’s on Sunday to take on arch-rivals Australia in the final.The match had started well for the South Africans, who grabbed the initiative after Wolvaardt won the toss, with Marizanne Kapp and Shabnim Ismail sublime in the power play. They bowled with pace and accuracy and left England floundering. The tournament’s leading run-scorer, Danni Wyatt-Hodge, was defeated by an excellent in-ducker from Kapp, while Ismail accounted for Amy Jones, with what she described as “not my best ball” — a short wide delivery cut to point by the English opener. With Alice Capsey trapped lbw for one by Ismail in the fourth over, England were wobbling at 23/3.The home team’s most experienced batters, their returning skipper Nat Sciver-Brunt and Heather Knight, carefully played out the remainder of the power play, seeing off Kapp, who again bowled her full quota of overs in one stint, conceding 16 runs, including only one boundary. Good as Knight and Sciver-Brunt were, the rest of the South African attack allowed them to ease into their respective innings. The grip Kapp and Ismail had created was loosened with too many balls off line, lengths that were incorrect while the slower ball was overused by Ayabonga Khaka and Nadine de Klerk.A scoring rate of less than a run a ball in the power play, shot up to more than eight afterwards, as the English batters settled. Sciver-Brunt, who top scored with 75, showed she was totally over the calf injury which saw her miss three group matches, running well between the wickets, and as she grew more accustomed to conditions, she became more adventurous with her stroke play. She unfurled a scoop that went for four, and as SA’s bowlers missed their lines, her favourite scoring area through mid-wicket came into play more. She and Knight, who made 58, shared a partnership of 133 off 90 balls that turned the course of the innings and ultimately the match.Full scorecard hereTimesLIVE