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. ...