So the Proteas avoided a white
wash last night when they beat the Kiwis by one wicket when Ryan McLaren hit a
six off the last ball. By no means was it a confident win, they limped over the
line and were it not for Graeme Smith’s 116 it would have been another embarrassing
lose to a significantly weaker New Zealand team. South Africa is ranked number
one in test cricket because they have a simple plan that is highly effective. We
play our best players every game and it works. Now I understand there has been
injuries and suspensions but its not rocket science, you play six specialist
batsmen and five specialist bowlers so that you don’t have part time bowlers
going for 10 an over. We have two of the best bowlers in the world in Morne
Morkel and Dale Steyn but we don’t play them at the same time. I don’t understand
that, they put it down to a rotation policy which is all fine and well but why rotate
your senior players? Keep a core of experienced players and then rotate the
younger guys around them, not the other way around. And in terms of the
captain, I don’t believe Faf Du Plessis has earned the right to captain the
team. There are far better qualified players who could do the job. Johan Botha
for example who has seemed to have dropped out of contention for a spot in the
side has an excellent record as captain and even has a series win in Australia
under his belt and has proved himself time and time again. Faf plays one good
innings and all of a sudden gets launched into the captain role, the last two
games the team were in trouble and needed their catain to step up and play an
innings but he failed to do so in both games. Graeme Smith however did step up
and hit an outstanding century to bring us close. He is even more qualified to
captain the team seeing as though he was the captain for so long. There is too
much chopping and changing in the team, with no consistency how do you expect
players to get any form, pick a team and let them play and develop them and
change maybe one player at a time. Like one of the commentators said yesterday,
in the test team every player knows his role and what he needs to do but it doesn’t
look that way in the one day side and I tend to agree, there is not enough
experience in the team, players who know what they need to do and how to do it.
Five run outs in the second game just back up that theory, panicking and
throwing away wickets due to lack of experience. What ever we do we need to
improve severely if we are to be successful against Pakistan who are a much
more formidable opponent then New Zealand.
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