Fans back home were still beating their fists raw in outrage over South Africa’s semifinal exit in the Caribbean when Cricket SA CEO Gerald Majola rushed out an announcement that the weaknesses and inconsistencies of the team would be ”addressed as a matter of urgency”.
A week has passed since that headline-grabbing statement and nothing more has been heard of the initiative. As in the real-life tragedy of Bob Woolmer’s death, this post-mortem is still shrouded in mystery and whispers.
The yet-to-be-named coroners at Cricket SA are perhaps reluctant to start the job because they now realise that a proper probe into our national cricket team’s performances will need to cut right down to the very soul of the game in this country.
Equally predictably, politics (meaning quotas) was quickly seized upon as the reason South Africa’s World Cup woes continued.
But racial politics had nothing to do with South Africa’s failure to get past Australia in their semifinal in St Lucia or their rollercoaster ride to fourth place in the Super Eights stage.
Complaining about quotas only fuddles the real issues. Who else could South Africa have selected that would have won the games against Australia, New Zealand and Bangladesh?
Selection was not the issue, but rather the rigid game plan that governed which 15 players were taken to the West Indies.
This will sound familiar to fans of other South African sports, especially rugby.
But, if South Africa’s one-and-only game plan (all-out aggression from the start, with both bat and ball) was foiled by conditions or the opposition, Graeme Smith’s team stumbled and lurched to defeat as if they had imbibed too many rum-and-cokes at a beach party.
Scant attention was paid to variety or a range of skills, qualities Australia, in particular, but also Sri Lanka and New Zealand value greatly. As an example, before the tournament, we heard over and over that South Africa had bowlers who could deliver cutters, but when the crunch came, this never materialised.
And thus, when conditions were suitable — white sand beaches and palm trees at their hotel, a pitch that offered some bounce or movement — the Proteas purred along like a well-oiled machine and their demolition jobs on England and the West Indies were among the most impressive of the tournament.
But as soon as they had to spend time in Guyana, a second-rate tourist destination, and play on the low and slow pitches of the Providence Stadium, their performances sank to mediocre.
South Africa’s approach is based on bullying but, after opponents have stared down the initial intimidation, there seems little else to worry about.
After the decision was made that South Africa’s tactic would be to attack early with the bat and use economical pace bowlers who generally bowl wicket-to-wicket, building pressure, the likes of Boeta Dippenaar and Dale Steyn would never have had a look-in anyway, and would have spent 47 days as frustrated tourists, a la Roger Telemachus.
If the post-mortem probe can ensure a change in mindset, a willingness to embrace other strategies, cultures and conditions than those the players are used to at home, then that would be a major success. The fact that the next World Cup is on the Indian sub-continent makes this imperative.
Smith has already said South Africa needs to find a spinner for the 2011 World Cup and that ”they need to back him”.
Quite who ”they” are is unclear; Smith was given Robin Peterson, an accomplished and experienced spinner at domestic level, but Smith himself has never backed him and, when called upon at the World Cup, it is little wonder the slow left-armer looked out of place.
To say spinners are not part of our culture and we struggle to produce them is a lie.
South Africa has produced a long line of world-class slow bowlers from Eric Petersen, Thoplan Parsuramen and Baboo Ebrahim (all denied proper opportunity by apartheid), to Aubrey Faulkner, Reggie Schwarz, Bert Vogler and Cyril Vincent, to Tufty Mann and Hugh Tayfield, Denys Hobson and Alan Kourie.
Majola also announced an exchange programme with India and Pakistan for young South African spinners. But this long-distance education will not solve the problem if spinners are not given the opportunity to perform at home. Smith calls on the spinner so rarely because he has not developed a trust for slow bowling or a full understanding of how to use spin.
Biologists call it Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, but the basic premise is adapt or die. If South African cricket fans are to live in hope once again in 2011, it calls for a radical new approach to how we think about the game.
Graeme Smith and Mickey Arthur’s heads are unlikely to roll just yet, but the inflexibility they showed in the Caribbean needs to be replaced by an invigorating new attitude that embraces all the skills and nuances of this wonderful game.