Ken Borland

Prices will have to be paid for another Proteas’ batting failure as South Africa look to stay alive in the series when the second Test against India starts at the Wanderers on Monday, their batting line-up being further weakened by the absence of Quinton de Kock.

The wicketkeeper was always going to miss the New Years Test as well as the final match of the series due to the birth of his first child, but then rocked the Proteas camp even further by announcing his retirement from all Test cricket on Thursday evening, just hours after South Africa had lost the first Test by 113 runs.

Kyle Verreynne is the most likely replacement for De Kock, although Ryan Rickelton has the advantage of playing on his home ground and being in red-hot form with two centuries in his last two innings at the Wanderers.

There is a chance that both could play if the Proteas decide to go into the match with just four frontline bowlers, replacing Wiaan Mulder with a specialist batsman. The all-rounder has done a solid job with the ball, but he has made just 106 runs in eight innings this year. South Africa need more from their No.7.

Keshav Maharaj is indisputably South Africa’s No.1 spinner and one of the senior players, but he was unused in the Indian second innings at Centurion and went wicketless in 18 overs on the first day. If the Wanderers pitch is similar – and it has certainly given the pacemen plenty of assistance so far this summer – then the Proteas will be tempted to leave Maharaj out and play an all-seam attack with Duanne Olivier joining left-armer Marco Jansen, who took four wickets in the Indian second innings and also showed enough gumption with the bat to do well at No.8.

Captain Dean Elgar paid a massive compliment to Jansen after the first Test and he also supported the suggestion that Keegan Petersen, who has scored just 76 runs in his five Test innings but in all of them he has come to the crease with less than five runs on the board, drop down the order.

“We’ll definitely look into the all-rounder position,” Elgar said. “Wiaan has been pretty good with the ball but obviously has not lived up to the standards he has set himself with the bat.

“So we’ll be having the sort of open conversations we need to have in this environment. I thought Marco was our player of the game and had a brilliant debut. But carrying two all-rounders is maybe not ideal.

“It’s a valid point about Keegan dropping down the order and that’s also a conversation we’ll have. We could potentially exercise that option, it’s not a bad idea to give him better opportunity against the older ball.

“He’s played three Tests and they’ve all been in relatively tough batting conditions. It’s been a rough start to his career but it doesn’t reflect on him as a player. He is extremely talented, he’s been one of our best domestically for a few years,” Elgar said.

Springbok scrumhalf Cobus Reinach says his move to playing in the French Top 14 has made him more alive to opportunities that present themselves on the field, which means his partnership with incisive flyhalf Handre Pollard against Georgia on Friday could be an exciting one.

Reinach left the Sharks in 2017 and played three seasons with Northampton before joining Montpellier last year. Pollard’s serious knee injury means they have not played together much as a halfback combination, but they have been training together.

“Playing overseas opens your eyes a bit, it takes you completely out of your comfort zone, which makes you grow as a player. The Top 14 is a bit different to the English Premiership, which is more structured, you’re playing to shapes and maps.

“But in the Top 14 you need to be more instinctive and therefore you are more alert, so you are able to deal with what happens in front of you. Cheslin Kolbe is such a good example of that with Toulouse. He can do anything, he’s able to create magic out of nothing,” Reinach said on Tuesday.

Since the now 31-year-old Reinach graduated from Grey College, he has been dealt an interesting deck of cards in his rugby career. After one year in Free State’s youth structures, he joined the Sharks Academy in 2009 and made his debut in the Vodacom Cup in 2011. He was in the Currie Cup squad before the end of that year, helping the Sharks win that trophy in 2013. From 2014 to 2017 he was pretty much the Sharks’ first-choice scrumhalf.

Injuries to Fourie du Preez and Ruan Pienaar saw Reinach make his Springbok debut in September 2014. He was involved in the build-up to the 2015 World Cup but then was a surprise omission from the final squad, the uncapped Rudy Paige being preferred.

From then until the 2019 World Cup, Reinach was in the international wilderness. But then he enjoyed the elation of not only winning the biggest cup of them all in Japan, but he also broke a World Cup record with a hat-trick in 11 minutes against Canada.

And now he is in line to play against the British and Irish Lions.

“It’s an unbelievable story that I can tell my kids for the rest of my life, but it’s not time now to think about that, there’s rugby to be played and I’m just trying to improve as a player. It’s great that so many of us from the World Cup squad are still together so it’s not hard to make sure we’re all on the same page. Now we just have to go out and show what we’ve learnt,” Reinach said.

Pink Day, the charity event raising funds for cancer research, has been hosted by the fast-paced city of Johannesburg at the Wanderers for the last 9 years and Sunday’s second ODI between South Africa and Pakistan may not have any spectators allowed, but the Proteas need to bring their usual intensity and action-packed approach in order to stay alive in the series.

The first ODI was lost on the back of a second-wicket partnership of 177 between Babar Azam and Imam-ul-Haq; Pakistan scraped to victory off the last ball of the match because the Proteas then fought back and claimed six wickets for 85 runs. They did that using aggressive fast bowling led by Anrich Nortje.

The Wanderers is traditionally a haven for pace and bounce and Autumn on the Highveld adds more moisture and swing into the equation as well. South Africa’s pacemen need to be smarter about exploiting the conditions more, they perhaps relied too heavily on slower balls and cutters at Centurion when an approach more in line with how they would bowl in a Test match was called for.

“The plan was to bowl more Test lengths and we started brilliantly, but as the pitch became harder and flatter it was really difficult to defend and the batsmen were able to score quite freely. But a lot of credit should go to the bowlers, I’ve been in a lot of situations like this on the Highveld and the team chasing gets home with five or six overs to spare,” centurion Rassie van der Dussen said after the first ODI on Friday night.

It was a valuable toss for Pakistan to win in the first game and it was tough going for the Proteas batsmen in the first hour. But some of the strokes offered were not well-executed as South Africa slumped to 55 for four before Van der Dussen came to their rescue.

The star batsman said the shot-selection could be excused, it was just the execution that let the batsmen down, and a similarly positive approach is likely to be brought to the Wanderers.

“Quinton de Kock and Aiden Markram gave us a good start and thought that they could then take on the powerplay. In hindsight they couldn’t because the pitch was a bit more difficult to bat on than they thought. You have to assess conditions and sometimes you make mistakes. But a guy like Quinny has played like that his whole career and we’re not too worried about the batting.

“England have probably been the best ODI team over the last two years and that formula works for them, so we want to give the batsmen the freedom to express themselves, especially up front in the powerplay. Quinny is usually brilliant there but it’s the nature of cricket that you won’t have success every time. Losing three wickets in a cluster is what we don’t want to do though,” Van der Dussen said.

South Africa will be playing in the evening again in Lahore on Saturday as they look to stay alive in their T20 series against Pakistan and opening batsman Janneman Malan said they will be better prepared having now experienced the interesting weather conditions in the ancient city and centre of culture.

Given it is winter in Pakistan and dew is prevalent in the evenings, the Proteas did the right thing after winning the toss and choosing to bat second in the first match of the series, but there was even more moisture than expected but it strangely had less impact than the visitors thought it would. They were hoping it would make a dry, slow surface more slick, allowing the ball to come on to the bat better and negating some of the turn. But that didn’t happen according to Malan.

“It was interesting weather, especially when the fog came in. Credit to Pakistan for taking two important catches in the closing stages in those conditions. There was a wet outfield, the ball was wet, but it still didn’t skid on as much as we expected, so it was quite a challenge against the spinners at the start. So we just tried to capitalise on the seamers while they tried to figure out what to do.

“But now that we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t work, we’ll have better plans for the second game. Some deliveries were more difficult to hit and it wasn’t so much about execution as having the right plans. So there’s room for improvement – we probably need to commit harder and have clearer, better plans. But as a batting unit, we’re not far off where we want to be,” Malan said after blasting 44 off 29 balls in the first T20.

But after Malan’s opening stand of 53 off 42 balls with Reeza Hendricks, South Africa’s next biggest partnership was 32 for the fourth wicket between Hendricks (54 off 42) and skipper Heinrich Klaasen (12) as wickets fell regularly after Pakistan made the initial breakthrough via exciting leg-spinner Usman Qadir. Just one more sizeable partnership would have made the Proteas’ chase so much easier.

“As a batting unit, we want to win games and we’re not far off clicking. Just one more big partnership and we would have won the game. We just need to come up with the best options for each batsman. Experience is important and we’re obviously missing some of that, but it’s more important that every player focuses on doing their job, we can all add value.

“Reeza was in a difficult position when I got out because he had not faced a lot of balls, but he kept a cool head and got the strike-rate up again. He was obviously upset that he didn’t finish the game, but his dismissal was unlucky and he played a very good innings. The second game is a good opportunity for us to bounce back hard and hopefully change the momentum so we can take that into the final game on Sunday,” Malan said.