CricketZA

South African bowling coach Charl Langeveldt feels that despite South Africa being mollywhopped from pillar to post the entire summer in Tests, there are positives and reasons for hope. It started with an absolute battering in the sub-continent at the hands of a rampant Indian side, there was a brief respite for a minute as Fortress Centurion stood tall, and then continued through three beatings of increasing severity against England.   “When I started with Cricket SA in December‚ we had a Test series against England which did not give us a lot of time as a unit to gel as a team‚” said Langeveldt, himself a former Test cricketer" “We had a lot of youngsters coming into the setup and that was really hard. “In saying that I also think there were lots of positives from the Test series. I think the guys played really well in patches but as a unit we couldn’t get it together as a bowling and as a batting unit.” Langeveldt was added to the Protea backroom staff with less tha...

As recently as 12 months ago, Aiden Markram would have been maybe the prohibitive favourite in the race to Test Captain of the South African national team, but the last year has seen him deal with various issues. There are three things you could argue that the captain of a team in a sport as captain-dependent as cricket cannot be:  - Injured  - Ill-disciplined  - Out of form Unfortunately for Markram, he has displayed each of these disqualifying factors to various degrees recently. It should be remembered that while Markram may indeed have been dropped anyway from the third Test vs India due to his poor form, he wasn't even considered for selection because he had broken his hand. And by that I mean he smashed his hand against an unnamed object following his dismissal in the second test vs India. Not exactly the sort of origin story which is often seen in many captain's autobiographies, Worse, still, the reason he broke his hand was out of frustration due to a run of...

Cricket South Africa Director of Cricket, Graeme Smith announced this morning that South African cricketers who have taken Kolpak contracts would indeed be welcomed back should they choose to return. Smith said in a video press conference, With Kolpak coming to an end, I guess the willingness is always to have our best players in the system," Smith told reporters via a video conference. "It is up to the players to come back into the system and to make decisions on their careers. "From our perspective, we want to encourage all our best players to play here domestically, and then give themselves the opportunity to be selected for the national side." Great Britain is set to leave the European Union at the end of this year, a move which has the unintended consequence of ending the Kolpak rule. Under the Kolpak rule, players from a country which has agreements with the European Union, like South Africa, are not considered foreign players, a distinction which proves v...

It was just an ordinary Sunday in Potchefstroom . The kids were out having fun, then suddenly David Miller went absolute nuclear vs the hapless Bangladeshis as he tallied the fastest T20 100 of all time.

Cricket South Africa (CSA) and Sri Lankan Cricket have postponed South Africa's tour of Sri Lanka due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The Proteas were due to play a three One Day International series as well three T20s in the Island nation in June, but the will be set aside for another time. "It is very sad that we have been forced to take this step and we will re-schedule the tour as soon as cricket returns to a sense of normality and our international fixture list allows," said Cricket South Africa's acting chief executive Jacques Faul.   "Our Proteas would not have been able to prepare properly taking our own lockdown situation into account and, more importantly, health considerations for our players, which are always paramount, were the over-riding factor.   "It would have been a particularly important tour for us with the three ODIs counting for the new ICC one-day league and the T20 programme being part of our preparation for the ICC T20 World Cup sc...

With Quinton de Kock having been eliminated from the running to be captain of the South African national team, the remaining nominees have basically selected themselves. First up is the diminutive maestro, Temba Bavuma. The general rule of thumb in the modern game is to pick your best XI, and then pick your captain from that best XI. This was not always the case, however, with men like Dr. Ali Bacher and Mike Brearley both having been made Test captain despite arguably not being part of the best XI players in their respective national set up. Cricket is different from other sports when it comes to captaincy. In other sports, the role of captain is a largely off-field job. How much can having Ronaldo as captain actually change your fortunes, for example? While I'm sure he's an inspirational figure, he is responsible for none of the tactical decisions made in the flow of a game. Not directly anyway. In contrast to this, the role of Test captain may be the single most import...

With Graeme Smith formally announced as the permanent Cricket South Africa Director of Cricket, focus has shifted to the next most important role in the national set-up. Test captain. Smith indicated earlier today that Quinton de Kock would not be the Test captain, according to SA cricket Magazine . "It's not going to be Quinton," he said, citing De Kock's responsibility as the country's limited-overs captain as well as being wicketkeeper and a key batsman. "Quinton will be our white-ball captain but from a workload and mental capacity aspect we want to keep him fresh. From personal experience I know that captaining all three formats is challenging and we don't want to overburden him." In some respects this is an understandable move. As the wicket-keeper and de facto lynchpin of the batting line-up, one could argue, quite convincingly that de Kock is stretched as is, especially considering that he is the captain of the limited overs sides. ...

Cricket South Africa have formally announced that former Protea cricket captain, Graeme Smith has been appointed as Director of cricket in a permanent capacity. Smith, 39, has signed a two-year contract which will run through until the 31st of March 2022. The move will come as a relief for South Africa, who have endured a difficult 12 months on the cricketing front, having lost seven out of their last eight Tests, and enduring an embarrassing group stage World Cup elimination. "Graeme has made a huge impact with his energy, expertise, hard work ethic and characteristic determination and passion he has brought to the position during the six months he has served in an acting capacity," CSA Acting Chief Executive Jacques Faul said on Friday.  "Although there is certainly a great deal of work to be done, as reflected by the performances of our various national teams, he has certainly put our cricket on an upward trajectory that provides light at the end of the tunne...

Cricinfo once described Graeme Smith as "Meaty, Mighty and Muscular", quite fitting given the fact that he is 6'4. His nickname, "Biff" is born from the way he muscles a cricket ball. Basically, Graeme Smith is if "Power and Aggression" was a person. But there's a little more to Smith than just sheer force. There's also an almost reckless sense of bravery. Much like the good Lord, this bravery giveth (after all, you need to be quite brave to accept the job of national team captain at the humble age of 22). It has also most definitely taketh (South Africa found themselves 27/5 in a World Cup Semi-Final while playing "Brave cricket"). There was obviously a high level of Cricket and general intelligence, and there was definitely a sense of ambition. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa to Graham (yep) and Jane Smith, Smith showed early leadership qualities from a young age while attending King Edward VII. Having moved down to...

It's not easy being the chairperson of the David Miller fan club. For whatever reason, he seems to have less latitude than similar players. Maybe it is because his destructiveness is never quite enough, although this is hardly ever his fault. In the 2015 World Cup, South Africa's efforts at securing a berth into the showpiece game was not enough, but Miller himself scored 49 runs off 18 balls in a whirlwind final assault. Crucially though, he got out in the final over. His dismissal cost South Africa a handful of runs in a game which went down to the penultimate ball. Similarly, in the 2013 Champions Trophy, as the entire Protea batting squad elected to commit hara kiri, Miller, who had come in at seven scored a defiant 56 to help South Africa score a less embarrassing 175. It was never going to be enough, but considering they were 80/8 at some point, 175 could be considered blushes spared. Regardless, though. South Africa lost. Add to that the fact that Faf du Plessis picke...

Heading into the final Test at Lord's in 2012, South Africa would have known that all they needed was a draw to seal the series. England was in disarray after Kevin Pietersen had decided that the middle of the series was the right time to give an interview regarding how difficult the task of being Kevin Pietersen was. Oh, he'd also been caught disparaging his captain at the time, Andrew Strauss to members of the Protea set up via text (somehow). Already one down in the series, with half the batting line-up horribly out of form, and a PR nightmare on the horizon, England were reeling. But they were the #1 team in the world for some or other reason, and like a weary, battle-hardened fighter about to lose his crown, this English side fashioned a final stand at the home of cricket using a mix of the old (incumbent wicket keeper Matt Prior) and the new (future wicket-keeper Johnny Bairstow). It was not to be though as the genius of Hashim Amla, and the metronome that is Vernon Phi...

It was a long and at times torturous season for Theunis de Bruyn as he lost his national contract, got dropped from the national team and had his future Director of Cricket, Graeme Smith basically undress him on global television for his dismissal on the fifth day against India. His domestic form was not poor, it just wasn't very long. Injury reduced his participation to three First-Class games were he scored 183 runs at an average of 36.7. Still, despite this he was still very upbeat about his chances for representing the national team in the future. as he told The Citizen  It was just one of those seasons and I have no answers to the questions why? But we need to put the situation in perspective with what is currently going on: we can’t even play cricket now, businesses are closing and it’s a crazy time. We can only hope this pandemic unites the nation and then we can stand up and rebuild. So, we need to take all that on board for perspective,’ De Bruyn told the  Citizen...

If there is anything we can learn from every World Cup since the 1992 World Cup, it is that it is ridiculous that South Africa managed to get to a Semi-Final in the first place. Kenya, Bangladesh, Ireland and Afghanistan won five of the twenty-nine games between them in debut World Cups from 1996 on-wards. South Africa, who at the time had played all of three One-Day games before the World Cup, had absolutely no business making the Semi-Finals. From that perspective, it could be argued that they over-performed massively during that World Cup. In an interview, Meyrick Pringle, South Africa's ODI fast bowler said members of the squad were not even sure as to whether or not the team would be going to the World Cup. Unlike other teams, South Africa also had to deal with a political twist to their mere participation. It had only been two years since Nelson Mandela had been released and, it was probably not a good look for a largely lily-white national team to land in Australia, ostens...

All players and staff in the Protea national team set up have emerged from their 14-day period of isolation symptom-free, with those who have been tested for the novel Coronavirus have all tested negative, according to Proteas' chief medical officer Shuaib Manjra. "All the players were symptom-free and those who opted to perform the tests returned negative results,"  Manjra told ESPNcricinfo The Proteas were in India for a three-match ODI series against which was postponed due to fears of a possible Coronavirus outbreak. Both sides have agreed that it will be rescheduled to a more mutually beneficial date in the future, presumably once the end of the world has stopped happening. In the meanwhile, with South Africa being in the midst of a 21-day lockdown, the players have resorted to home gym and home exercises, with the team trainer Tumi Masekela telling the media, "We've got time now to work with players in terms of addressing the small niggles that they...

It says something about the proceeding years that most people couldn't tell you that a 21-year old Vernon Philander was a member of the 2007 World T20 team. I don't blame you if you do not remember. Even Gulam Bodi was probably slightly more memorable, given his spat with Kevin Pietersen. The birth of Vernon Philander the international cricketer is instead viewed as having been at Newlands 2011. Full disclosure, people. This might be my single favourite Test of all time. It all starts with Michael Clarke scoring maybe the finest hundred by a visiting batsman in the last ten years. Coming in at 40-3, with a rampant bowling attack in top form, Clarke scored 151 of the most incredible runs you could see. From the moment Clarke walked in to to the moment Australia lost their tenth wicket, 244 runs were scored. Of those, Clarke scored 151 of them. Australia were thus all out for 284, and South Africa would have been feeling reasonably confident of getting a lead here. No. The...

In the wonderfully entertaining Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Brad Pitt's title character notes that "In the end, you start to think about the beginning". Philosophically, this tends to be the case. As the end of anything draws nearer, we tend to remember the spring of that thing, be it a relationship or a life. In sport though, in the end, we tend to think about the end. This can be seen no clearer than in the case of Hashim Amla. A career which had over 18 000 runs and 55 centuries - both marks good for #2 on the all-time list in South African terms - seemed to really drag on by the end, with many calling for Zubayr Hamza to become his successor as it became clear that the well had run dry. Very few people, if any, called for him to stay once he did retire, and there has been no clamoring for his return in the way there was and continues to be for his 2004 debut alumni, AB de Villiers . Some of this obviously is because AB de Villiers was a superstar in global terms, and as ...

Like the rest of the sports world, the South African cricket team has not been spared from the financial impact of the Coronavirus outbreak. On the 16th of March, all cricket in South Africa was cancelled for the next 60 days, which saw the cancellation of the One Day Cup as well as the Four Day Cup. On an international level, the men's tour to India was called off without a single ball being bowled, while the women's inbound tour of Australia has already been cancelled. Sri Lanka are the second nation due to tour the country for the women's tour and even that series is on the line, with a final decision only to be taken six weeks before the tour. Fortunately, however, Cricket South Africa president, Jacques Faul has announced that as of now there are no plans in place to cut the players' salaries, at any level of the game. He warned that this could change in future, but at the moment, the players can rest easy. "For now we've budgeted for the amount. It...