Ken Borland

The Proteas don’t seem to be close to resolving who their Test captain should be, which certainly seems to be negatively impacting the performance of the struggling outfit, but I guess knowing who definitely shouldn’t be the skipper is a step in the right direction though.

Sadly for one of South African cricket’s favourite sons, Quinton de Kock has produced a pretty open-and-shut case for why he should not be captain as he has scored just 74 runs in six innings at an average of only 12.33 since taking the reins. A struggling batting line-up that had become used to De Kock bailing them out really cannot afford the flow of runs from his dashing blade to be stopped like that.

The 28-year-old wicketkeeper/batsman is just too valuable to not have playing well and whatever is hindering him from producing his usual world-class performances needs to be removed from his burden.

There is no shame in him standing down: He took on the job with some reluctance but out of a sense of duty as a senior player in a rebuilding side. For me, there are parallels with the great Hashim Amla, who relinquished the captaincy in January 2016 because he felt the team would be better served by him focusing on his batting.

In his press conferences, De Kock certainly does not seem to be enjoying the captaincy (although bubble life is probably also not making him happy) and personality-wise he is never going to be the sort of skipper who inspires through rousing speeches and being demonstrative out on the field. Sometimes his head doesn’t even seem to be in the game, such is his laidback demeanour.

So who are they going to appoint as the new Test captain? ‘When are the Proteas going to be playing Test cricket again?’ is probably the question that needs to be answered first though. As things stand, there are no confirmed Tests for the rest of the year.

But it seems obvious the new leader is going to come from one of three, maybe four, candidates – Aiden Markram, Temba Bavuma, Dean Elgar or Rassie van der Dussen.

Whoever gets the job, they are going to need to bring new energy, intensity and fight to the team. The kind of enthusiasm that the new-look T20 side showed at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, even though they made mistakes and ended up losing to the home side by three runs.

The answer to the old question about whether leaders are born or made is pretty clear to me: sure, the leadership skills of someone can be improved by the right programs and mentors, but the innate ability to lead is either there or it is not. The best captains are those who truly enjoy and embrace the role, and the troops respond to the assuredness that is projected. The team will have direction.

Who is the captain-elect who has the loyalty of the whole team? Who is ready for the burden and will flourish under it, lifting the team’s performances at the same time?

Is it Markram, who has been groomed and anointed as the future skipper ever since he led the SA U19s to the World Cup title? The determination of the 26-year-old is clear as the runs have mercifully started flowing again after a tough couple of years.

Or is it Bavuma, the talisman of the team is so many ways and the face of the hopes of millions of cricket fans? The tenacity and energy he shows can only be inspirational.

What of Elgar, the senior statesman, the reliable one, the guy who constantly puts his body on the line on the field and is one of the biggest characters in the changeroom?

Or Van der Dussen, the relatively new face, still making his way in Test cricket but who exudes the sort of calm and composure that is also vital in the make-up of a leader?

We wait with bated breath for whoever the successor is going to be. They will carry our hopes as the Proteas try and re-establish themselves as a world power, it is going to be a very tough job with so many external challenges, and whoever gets the captaincy is going to need the support of the whole country.

But South Africa has a proud cricketing heritage that needs to be restored by this man, whoever it ends up being.

The mental weaknesses of the Proteas cricket team, especially on the subcontinent, are well-known with even coach Mark Boucher pointing to them in the last week as an ongoing problem following their 2-0 Test series defeat in Pakistan. And Jeremy Snape is a former England cricketer turned sports psychologist who is well-acquainted with how it feels to crumble under pressure.

Snape, an off-spinner and useful lower-order batsman, tells the story of how he became interested in sports psychology.

“It was at Eden Gardens in Kolkata in front of 120 000 fans playing an ODI for England in 2002 and I ran out Freddie Flintoff. My mind just went blank in a tight run-chase; there were all those people screaming at me and not for me, but the voice in my head was still the loudest of all. That’s when I started to become fascinated with the psychology of sport,” Snape told Saturday Citizen.

He completed his Masters degree in sports psychology and one of his first jobs as a performance coach was with the South African cricket team, between 2008 and 2010. Which just so happens to be the time when Mickey Arthur and Graeme Smith took the Proteas to the pinnacle of world cricket; it is arguably the most glorious period in South Africa’s cricket history.

So Snape is well-acquainted too with the South African psyche. As someone who played in that triumphant 2008-2010 period, Boucher will also be aware of Snape’s philosophies.

The 47-year-old founder of the Sporting Edge performance consultancy describes the current Proteas as probably being too focused on the pressures of achieving a certain outcome rather than just focusing on the process.

“The mental game is the final frontier for cricket after improving fitness levels to those of real athletes and the era of analytics that has really made techniques transparent. Cricketers spend days after days in the nets practising their drives and pulls, but hardly any time on the mental game, and yet it is your mindset that defines your success.

“Cricket is the same as golf in that a round of golf takes four hours but you’re only actually playing, on the ball, for 22 minutes. But the key is in the routine as you approach the ball and it’s the time between deliveries that’s most important in cricket as well. The mental challenges are obviously what you don’t see watching the game and pressure does crazy things.

“It’s like when you lose your car keys and you start looking in the most stupid places for them; your brain gets scrambled and you can’t think clearly. And we need to remember we are dealing with humans, they are not computers wearing Proteas shirts. The humanity is what makes for the incredible stories of sport, but the frustrations as well,” Snape said.

As the old cliché goes: take it ball-by-ball.

“There’s a lot of emotion in South African sport around the outcome of matches and that incredible passion fuels commitment and drive. But you need the players to be calm and in control, so it’s like two opposites. They need to focus on the process of what they’re doing rather than the outcome, they need to take the emotion out of it and then they will be much more in control and consistent.

“They need to be in a clear, objective state and not contaminated by their history on the subcontinent. The new challenge is just that one ball, the next ball. You need like a volume control that you can drop down, mental toughness is about being able to dial up and down. You still need an end target because that’s what winning is about, but it’s about zooming back and being able to manage what is important right now,” Snape said.

Being patient is also a key quality, especially when you are out of your comfort zone.

“On the subcontinent, the biggest threat is your own frustration. So I devised a practical exercise – a 10×10 matrix which was a grid of numbers, a bit like a bingo card. The numbers from one to 100 were randomly arranged and the players have to complete finding each number in order. The first few are found generally quite quickly, but then it takes more time to find the others.

“It’s a metaphor for Test cricket when runs are often hard to come by; times when you have to absorb pressure, be patient and over-ride your frustration. T20 cricket is obviously different – that’s about being able to switch between two rooms in your mind: your strategy room where you look at where the fielders are, the wind direction, the shorter boundary, but then when you step into your crease you are in the next room, you stop thinking and you just react to what you see,” Snape, who helped Shane Warne’s Rajasthan Royals to the IPL title, explains.

It would seem the mental side of the game is just as important for this current Proteas team to get right as the technical if they are to return to being a force in world cricket again.

*Jeremy Snape’s Sporting Edge consultancy provides keynote events as well as digital learning experiences through a series of videos and podcasts, that members can subscribe to, going inside the minds of champions. See https://www.sportingedge.com/

Proteas coach Mark Boucher said he was pleased with the bravery of the South African batting line-up despite their faltering performances in the T20 series which saw them crash to 65 for seven in the decisive third match on Sunday and ultimately lose by four wickets.

The Proteas only made a match of the third T20 thanks to David Miller’s tremendous 85 not out off 45 balls, one of the best innings of his long career, taking them to 164-8. Miller’s defiant knock was only South Africa’s second half-century of the series with opener Reeza Hendricks being the only other batsman to pass 50. Miller was also the only Proteas batsman to score more than 100 runs in the series.

“We’ve played some good cricket this series, been in strong positions but just not been able to pull it off. The second game [which they won by six wickets] is the brand of cricket we want to play. we showed more intent, especially with the bat. We need to be more proactive and not reactive, we need the bravery we showed in that second match.

“But today we needed to be more smarter, although we were in trouble and we still managed to get a decent total, we were in the game until the last couple of overs. But losing four wickets in three overs in this game put us under lots of pressure. But David Miller played a great knock and it was good to see him back in the runs,” Boucher said.

The fact that South Africa were in the game defending 165 was largely thanks to the outstanding spin bowling of Tabraiz Shamsi, who took a career-best four for 25. But from needing 47 off the last five overs when Shamsi finished his four overs, Pakistan sped to victory with eight balls remaining and batsmen seven and eight at the crease.

South Africa’s quick bowlers were poor, with Dwaine Pretorius conceding 33 runs in three overs, Lutho Sipamla 23 in two and Andile Phehlukwayo having 37 runs bashed off his 2.4 overs. And it is not an isolated incident because over the last couple of years South Africa have conceded the second-most runs in the last four overs of T20 Internationals.

“We’re bowling a lot of yorkers in training and the death bowling is something we continue to work at. There was a lot of dew tonight so it was difficult and Pakistan’s death bowling wasn’t particularly good either to be fair. We want quite a few options for the death and the only way that is going to happen is by putting guys in that situation.

“Kagiso Rabada and Anrich Nortje have shown in the IPL that they are fantastic at the death and so we’ve tried out one or two other options in this series. The way Dwaine Pretorius bowled in the second game was fantastic and it’s something we will keep working on and hopefully get better at, we’re working hard on it in training,” Boucher said.

Not making use of the facilities at your disposal is one of the serious crimes of the sporting world, and Proteas captain Heinrich Klaasen said his team wasting a handful of their 20 overs cost them the match in the first T20 against Pakistan and is what they have to put right in the games on Saturday and Sunday in Lahore if they are to win the series.

South Africa fell three runs short in the first T20 in a gutsy effort, but they would have expected to chase down 170 on a good pitch for batting. But having been 51 without loss after the six powerplay overs, the Proteas then lost their way, but the next six overs saw them slip to 83 for three, leaving them to score 87 runs off 48 balls. Which was too steep a task.

“I thought that Pakistan were 10 runs short and I was very happy with our effort in the field and to be chasing 170. But it was just four or five overs in the middle where we made life very difficult for ourselves. Usman Qadir bowled two overs and had two for four in that middle phase and that put us on the back foot in the middle overs.

“Hopefully we can lift our intensity in that middle phase and then we’ll get over the line. Our standards are high, we don’t like losing although we played a good game of cricket. One or two bowling things didn’t go to plan, we need to reassess one or two overs, but I was generally very pleased with how the bowling went, and I was quite pleased with the fielding, but not the two dropped catches at the end,” Klaasen said after his first match as Proteas captain.

Among the positives in the batting was that Janneman Malan and Reeza Hendricks came off as an opening pair. Malan blazed his way to 44 off 29 balls before becoming Qadir’s first victim as he was made to look silly by a superb delivery, while Hendricks batted as the anchor and made it through to the 18^th over, scoring 54 off 42 balls. Some critics have described Hendricks’ innings as being too slow, but with wickets tumbling at the other end he obviously saw his role as being to bat for as long as possible until someone could form another partnership with him.

“I was very happy with the start and Reeza only faced 12 balls in the first seven overs, so Janneman was always going to score more quickly. Unfortunately Janneman got out when we could have completely taken the powerplay away from them, then we lost the game between overs seven and 10. We didn’t do too badly tonight, but we just slipped up in the crucial moments.

“But that’s part of the learning process and the key this weekend is to be patient and take control of those moments. Hopefully the new guys will use the opportunity to showcase their skills, we need to be adaptable and we will chop and change a few things,” Klaasen said.