The country’s captain-in-waiting tells why and how he believes South Africa’s cricketing future must be strengthened
CRICKET: Paul Martin
HANSIE CRONJE, whom the selectors plan to appoint national cricket captain next month, has pinpointed a lack of all-year-round fitness as a significant factor in South Africa’s failure to win the Test series or either of the two one-day internationals against England.
Only through the harnessing of modern technology to the cricketing cause, he believes, can South Africa accomplish its goal of winning the 1996 World Cup and reaching equality with the best in Test cricket. “We’ve been feeling our way for three years. It’s no use any more saying: we’re learning, we’re learning, we’re learning. It’s time we learned — now,” Cronje states.
Cronje calls for a more scientific approach to South African cricketers’ physical and technical preparation for international series, and claims that in this regard South African cricket lagged far behind developments in other countries, especially Australia.
“We have the resources in South Africa, we have everything we need to apply more science to our cricketers, but we’re not using it,” the South African vice-captain declares while delivering a hard-hitting analysis of the country’s current cricketing prowess.
“Only one of our pace bowlers has the sort of physical flexibility that all the West Indian quickies do,” he maintains. “Allan Donald can bowl at the speed of light when he gets it right, but we need not one but four guys who can flex their muscles a bit more. Then they could bowl a bit quicker, or we could get two or three overs more from each of them.”
Certainly, the previously much-vaunted South African bowling was at times somewhat less than disciplined on the England tour. Yet the batting especially of the top order, was as great a cause for concern. Here Cronje wants far more use of videos to analyse batsmen’s technical inadequacies — including his own. Coupled with a tried-and-tested formula: hours of daily net practice.
In both the batting and bowling departments Cronje is convinced that the frailties exposed in England, and the inability to clinch the previous two series against Australia, were the result of a lack of strength in counteracting the wearing physical and mental effects of a long exposure to international cricket from late last year until now.
“There is a different level required for all-year- round fitness, rather than our past need to be fit for just six months,” Cronje says. “In our years of isolation we could take a three-month break, then three months’ preparation. Now we must keep the level of fitness consistent. Today it’s very difficult motivating the guys, but we have to work out how to do it.”
Though hardly yet in his mid-twenties, Cronje has already experienced the peaks and valleys of the international cricketing landscape. This year in Australia came first the joys of unexpected test captaincy, when he led the team in the last innings at sensational Sydney, then came bumpily down to earth as the side lost in the concluding test at Adelaide.
‘There’s nothing like the high of winning and low of losing as captain — even when you only got there because the real skipper was injured,” he notes. “You feel responsible for all 11 guys, the off-the-field behaviour, the over-rates, for everything. Yet when it goes well the individual players get the credit, not the captain. If I lead the South African team in my own right, at least I’ve had a foretaste of what to expect!”
The team’s current decline in fortunes since the heights of Lord’s were accentuated, Cronje feels, by a punishing itinerary of three-day matches interspersed with Tests, which he says proved enervating especially for the pacemen on whom South Africa had relied almost exclusively. In Australia the gaps between Tests had been filled with one- dayers. Though producing intense periods of activity they were over within hours, and were therefore, he points out, less wearing.
Scheduling is, however, not to be used as an excuse: the fault, as the Shakespeare that Cronje studied at Grey College put it, lay not in our stars but in ourselves.
“The West Indians are ahead of us, but the Aussies are way ahead of us all. We just have to catch up,” insists Cronje. He rates England’s ability to fight back, as they have done in two recent series under Atherton, and then against South Africa, as partly explicable by their more analytical approach.
“I take my hat off to Atherton and his men. We can learn some lessons in technique, for one thing, from a side who’re bowled out against the West Indies for 46, then come back the next Test match with a huge score,” Cronje acknowledges.
In the West Indies for South Africa’s inaugural Test tour, Cronje had been impressed by the sight of the West Indian coach typing away at his computer as the matches progressed.
“He kept on putting in data,” Cronje recalls. “We need our own 12th man, or the physio, or when we’re batting the captain or vice-captain, to take more notes: runs that each of us, and our opponents, score on the off versus the leg or on-sides, how well bowlers do in their third spells, and so on. We can get videos of our opposition in advance to study their weak points.
“Back home we need to discover through scientific tests the best foods for each players’s physique, what forms of practice work best, and to keep monitoring our fitness levels.”
Once the physical aspects are taken care of, the captain can concentrate on the purely cricketing matters essential to a victorious team, he points out. In this quest South Africa would be aided, he says, by the return of Brett Schultz, to give Allan Donald the necessary fast-bowlers-in-tandem armoury. “Also, in years to come we’ll realise that spin bowling is very crucial to winning Test matches,” Cronje adds.
“I think South African cricket has got a great future. It has the necessary resources and the right back-up. In 1996 we will surprise the world,” Cronje predicts, “but only if we use the next two or three years wisely, with extensive help of science.”
Cronje has already been getting himself tested every three months, he reports, “to see what my body-fat levels are, and to check where I can strengthen myself. So we measure my biceps in comparison to my triceps, quads versus hamstrings and so on.” The aim of the Cibex programme, he says, is “to work out what the ultimate is for an athlete”.
Of his own recent failures with the bat, and the woes of his team in the past couple of weeks, Cronje is sensibly philosophical.
“After all the disappointment of the Oval, and the shockingly crap series I had, I went for a run in the evening past Buckingham Palace, then down the River Thames, past Big Ben, the Palace of Westminster … and I said to myself: “It’s not the end of the world. Here you are, you have all the opportunities that every single one back home dreams of, yet you’re so down and negative about it.
“Why don’t you just get up and do your best in future?’ That’s what I’ll strive for.
“There are times when you say: Not another game … for example, against the Minor Counties. Then you think about many top cricketers of the past decade like Vince van der Bijl who’d have given anything to have an overseas test tour.
“We’ve seen so many wonderful sights and experiences…meeting Mother Theresa, meeting Sir Garfield Sobers, Clive Lloyd, the greatest captain. To be able to be part of cricketing history, to say “I was there when this guy took the sixth best figures in Test history, even though he bowled me!’ To win at Lords after 29 years. To win at Sydney defending only 117.
“It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. And doing it now when South Africans of all population groups are right behind you — that makes a huge difference too.”