Peter Robinson cricket
Normal service having been resumed by Shaun Pollock’s South Africans in the Caribbean, this might be as good a point as any to consider the vexed question of rotation. By way of explanation, rotation is the selection policy employed by Manchester United football club and the Australian one-day cricket team. As a guiding principle it overturns one of sport’s most venerable maxims. Whenever possible, insists rotation, change a winning team. Not just on a whim, mind you, but with a greater prize than the next result as the eventual goal. Rotation accepts fluctuations in form, physical and mental. Indeed, it’s partly predicated on the belief that as sports calendars grow ever crowded, not everyone’s going to be on top of his or her game all the time. So what rotation believes is that in an 11-man sport, for instance, long-term ambitions are better served by having 14 or 15 players able to step in at any time rather than fielding a First XI week in and week out. Super 12 rugby has reinforced this point to South African teams where it is now widely accepted that success is built on strength in depth. Cricket, however, particularly South African cricket, still seems to need a little persuading. Despite the evidence to the contrary, the wider South African public tends to regard each and every one-day international as a contest in and of itself to be won at all costs. In turn this pushes on to the selectors and eventually on to the team itself. We’ve lost the first ODI in Jamaica? Well, get rid of the out of form Gary Kirsten. Send Lance Klusener home. What does coach Graham Ford think he’s doing? The point being that if South Africa fully subscribed to rotation instead of simply paying lip service to the idea they’d give themselves a little more room in which to breathe. It’s obvious to anyone that Kirsten and Klusener and Mark Boucher have all been some way off their best in the Caribbean and that any or all of them could do with a break. To leave any of them out now, however, would be to suggest that they have been dropped and it hardly needs to be spelled out that no player likes to be dropped. There’s a financial aspect to this, too. As things stand with the South African team at present, 12 match fees are paid for each one-day international. Eleven of these fees go to the players selected for the game with the 12th shared either by the remainder of the squad or those who perform 12th man duties. Prize monies (man of the match awards and the like) are usually, but not always, divvied up among the squad. As things stand, then, your premier fast bowler, for example, might feel that he needs a break, but with a bond payment coming up he’s hardly going to be willing to miss out on one match fee, let alone two or three or four. The solution is simple: pay each member of the chosen one-day squad an equal match fee and remove this element from the equation. Whatever you think of Hansie Cronje, his reasoning was perfectly sound before the last World Cup when he argued that ideally South Africa should go into the tournament with the least-experienced players having 30 or 40 or 50 games under their belts. South Africa, of course, might protest that they already rotate players, but the reality is that this usually consists of swapping one spinner for another or giving a “player of colour” a run at the fag end of a series. To an increasing degree, this last practice has increasingly become irrelevant. With 14-man squads now usually containing four or five black players on merit and the percentage increasing with almost every series, South Africa could barely field an all-white team these days if they tried. The other argument for rotation is flexibility. For all South Africa’s efficiency at the one-day game, the pattern still tends to be a little rigid. Rotation would force players and captains and coaches to free up their thinking, to spread their net of trust a little wider and to become better equipped to deal with the unexpected. If South Africa want to win the 2003 World Cup, they really ought to start rotating now. Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa