FIVE years ago, South African cricket was at its lowest ebb.
That year, the team went from handing Sri Lanka their first Test series victory here at home due to complacent performances in Durban and Gqeberha, to crashing out of the ODI World Cup in the group stages in the UK a few months later.
The cricket on the field was average while behind the scenes, SA cricket continued to make headlines for all the wrong reasons, with coach Mark Boucher’s name coming up in Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza’s Social Justice and Nation Building Hearings.
During that time, the national team lost its main sponsor and went for multiple years without one.
With a few rearrangements in the suits running the game behind the scenes, a new coaching staff and a team that seemed to have finally fully transitioned into a formidable international side, the Proteas appear to be on an upward trajectory.
The side certainly left no doubts about their coming of age as they displayed a different level of hunger, going unbeaten on their way to the country’s first appearance at a World Cup final.
Despite narrowly losing to India by seven runs in this past weekend’s T20 World Cup final, the Proteas have set a lot of wrongs right, including getting rid of the ‘chokers’ tag that has followed the team in every edition of the World Cup.
With three of the World Cup finalists arriving at OR Tambo International Airport today – Lungi Ngidi, Keshav Maharaj and Ottneil Baartman – the work will have to continue as there is the ICC Champions trophy next year, a tournament that will help the side prepare for the home ODI World Cup in 2027.
With several of the Proteas’ World Cup squad members currently in the US for Major League Cricket, another tournament which will see the world’s best T20 players go head to head starting tomorrow, there’s no doubt that these players will only grow in confidence and bring all that experience into the Proteas team in the near future.
If anything, what this World Cup has demonstrated is that at the Proteas level, coaches need to be given freedom in selecting their teams.
Proteas white-ball coach Rob Walter was the first coach to be given the green light to select the squad he saw fit to take South Africa to new heights despite it only including one black African player, Kagiso Rabada.
However, the coach and his preferred team went on to achieve what many believed was out of reach for any Proteas team.