As Proteas Cricket World Cup disasters go the effort of 2019 is matched only by the group stage exit in 2003 and begs the question, what happens next?
It is fairly obvious that the next step will be media post-mortems followed by scapegoating from the team and administration. You don’t even need to be a follower of cricket to figure that out.
Had the Proteas made a decent fist of getting into the World Cup semi-finals, and narrowly missed out, it would likely have allowed the team to continue pretty much as is for the next few years. However, the abject display has become a matter of national embarrassment and therefore heads must roll.
The camp’s of opinion are beginning to separate and distil their ideas on the subject. Some are already calling for a complete overhaul of the team’s leadership structure, in other words, calling for the sacking of coach Ottis Gibson and skipper Faf Du Plessis. The less radical axe-wielders want to see the Proteas change their batting coach and drop underperforming veterans. Still another group want to see the Cricket South Africa board taken to task over how cricket is being run and have called for a massive structural overhaul.
2019 has not been a good year for coach Ottis Gibson, after an encouraging start to his tenure, this year’s high-profile flops may have made his position untenable. The former West Indies fast bowler has done some good work with the team’s quick bowlers, but batting failures and tactical naivety saw the Proteas lose a home Test series to a Sri Lanka team who have done nothing but lurch from crisis to crisis in the last few years. Add the World Cup display to that and most objective observers would conclude something is rotten in South African cricket.
The push to have Titans coach, Mark Boucher take the reins of the Proteas is growing momentum and it would be very surprising if he is not named as Gibson’s successor. As the coach of South Africa’s most succesful franchise and a Proteas legend, the appointment would have few opponents. Whether Boucher could bring about the change in approach necessary for the team to achieve success on the global stage cannot be said. Critics of Boucher point out that he lacks formal training as a coach with the obvious counter being that he was a national team stalwart for many years and has experience that you can’t teach.
The captaincy is another thorny issue that will need to be dealt with. Du Plessis has come in for a lot of criticism throughout the World Cup and before for some tactical missteps but most pundits feel that he has taken the team forward. The candidates to replace him are Quinton de Kock, a man who doesn’t want the job and probably isn’t suited to it, or Aiden Markram, who was seemingly born to captain the Proteas. Markram and De Kock have led the side before but only as stand-ins. Markram will lead the side one day, but in the short-term Du Plessis is likely to hang on to the job.
Cricket South Africa have their hands full with their attempts to restructure the domestic game and may see the World Cup performance as the perfect justification for those changes. The player’s Union opposes CSA’s restructuring which would see more professional teams but ultimately less full-time cricketers. We can expect some sort of review to be launched by CSA but don’t hold your breath waiting for positive changes in the boardroom.
The idiom more things change the more they stay the same has rung true of South African cricket through attempts at professionalisation and transformation. The systems in place to produce top-flight cricketers are outdated putting the team behind countries like England and Australia and the professional game has some way to go to catch up to the game’s elite. Some of that is simply down to cricket not making enough money to be as professional as County Cricket organizations are, but CSA must address issues with player development and preparation or face constantly repeating the same cycle.
Written by James Richardson for Hollywoodbets
