Ken Borland

Kagiso Rabada, the Proteas’ top strike bowler, admitted on Monday that the previous season was a disappointment, backing up the statistics which show that it was the 25-year-old’s poorest since he began playing Test cricket for South Africa.

The former No.1 bowler in the world played six Tests in the 2019/20 season and took 21 wickets at an average of 32.85, the first time since making his debut in 2015/16 that his average has dipped into the ‘mediocre’ thirties. His previously least successful season was 2017 in England when he took 16 wickets in three Tests at 28.43. His career figures of 197 wickets in 43 Tests at an average of just 22.95 are a truer reflection of the immense talent he possesses.

To make matters worse, Rabada missed the crucial fourth Test against England at the Wanderers, when the Proteas had a chance of levelling the series, having been suspended for once again provocatively celebrating in the dismissed batsman’s face. The Wanderers has been a happy hunting ground for the Central Gauteng Lions star, with 24 wickets in five Tests there, at an average of just 20.54.

Rabada did not play in an ODI over the summer, but his performance in the World Cup last year was a let-down as he took just 11 wickets in nine matches, at an average of 36.09 and an economy rate of 5.08.

“This Covid-19 has affected people from multiple points of view and there are a lot of economic challenges. But I’ve been glad to get the rest, just not in the way it came, because the last five years have gone really quickly and there’s been a huge volume of cricket. So I’ve really, really enjoyed the break, it’s allowed me to think about what I really want, which makes it easier to set goals.

“The past season was disappointing, my stats were okay but I felt really rusty and a bit out of place. But it’s never supposed to be easy at international level and next season I will just take it day-by-day and try and achieve a new set of goals. Whatever I can contribute to the team winning would be great. That means you enjoy your cricket more and I am 150% committed to South African cricket,” Rabada said on Monday.

Rabada seemed less concerned with his overexuberant celebrations that have landed him in trouble with match referees and have certainly distracted from the focus of the Proteas at key times.

“It’s just passion. I’ve identified the things I need to work on and I will address those with the people closest to me and those people who I feel should help me. People are always going to criticise you in some way and it’s important not to take that to heart. You will always have critics no matter what you do and what others say should not affect you.

“It’s up to you what you want to reflect on and it’s got nothing to do with anyone else,” Rabada, who has been helping out the World Health Organisation with his Viral Wellness initiative along with Cameron Scott and Kingdom Kome, said.

Springbok tighthead prop Marcel van der Merwe began his professional rugby career at the Free State Cheetahs in 2011 and would play alongside and scrum against a strong but raw loosehead from Limpopo by the name of Trevor Nyakane.

In 2013 Van der Merwe joined the Blue Bulls and made his Super Rugby debut for them the following year. Nyakane followed the Welkom-born, Paarl Boys’ High School educated tighthead to Pretoria, with Van der Merwe then leaving for Toulon in June 2016.

The 29-year-old Van der Merwe will now return to the Bulls after four years in France and he will find Nyakane has not only switched to tighthead prop but become an integral part of both the Bulls and Springbok teams. There will be competition aplenty now for what new Bulls coach Jake White has called the most important position in the team, and Nyakane welcomes it.

Not only because it will push the 31-year-old to even greater heights but it will also help manage his workload. Nyakane had very little respite in last year’s Super Rugby competition, starting every single game, all 17 of them. Eventually all that physical strain adds up and it may have played a role in his unfortunate departure from the 2019 World Cup, after tearing a calf muscle in the second half of the opening game against the All Blacks.

“I played with Marcel at both Free State and the Bulls and I know the type of player he is, so it’s going to be amazing to have him in the squad. We can now look at alternating at tighthead, it’s always great to be able to do that, but you also want to play of course. But it’s really difficult in a full season to play every game,” Nyakane told The Citizen at the One Cup of Pap Feeding Scheme, alongside fellow World Cup winners John Smit and Joel Stransky, who were also helping to hand out food parcels.

White has been quick to make changes at the Bulls and Nyakane said it will be exciting times when the squad finally gets together again after Lockdown. “It’s always exciting having a new coach to change things up a bit and I look forward to meeting up with Jake and everyone else when we go back to Loftus. The coach has obviously been bulking up the squad, which only makes it easier to rotate and manage players, and to have fresh blood coming in will be a positive,” Nyakane said.

Richard Pybus has been one of the real legends of domestic coaching in South Africa, having won nine trophies with the Titans and Cape Cobras franchises, but he began his career guiding lowly Border into a position where they were competitive against the big guns of local cricket. So when the former Pakistan and West Indies coach says plans to change the domestic structure, increasing the top level to 12 provincial teams, are not addressing the true problems in South African cricket then his views should be considered seriously.

“It’s a terrible idea,” Pybus said of the plan to do away with the six franchises at the top table of domestic cricket. “They are trying to fix the wrong thing. The issue is the administration of the game and not franchise cricket. Why are Cricket South Africa in their current financial position? They should review that. Why pull apart a highly effective system, the same sort of model that has given Australia consistent success?

“The issue is not our model but getting our administration right. Our problems are not about the franchise game, that’s giving us what is needed, which is incredible competition, the best 66 players in the country going up against each other. The franchise system was directly responsible and supported our national team getting to number one. We want strength versus excellence, not to dilute that,” Pybus told The Citizen from his house in Hermanus.

The 55-year-old Pybus said the domestic system needed to reflect the differences between the high-performance needs of the Proteas pipeline and those of growing the game.

“Our cricket has lots of layers and it needs to be clearer whether those layers serve the recreational game or the Proteas, with a lot of layers not really serving either of them. A lot of our cricket should not be professional and any changes should be about strengthening that level. We have a brilliant, multi-cultural game and it also needs to be inclusive.

“The development programme does have some issues, there are not enough players coming from Black communities, but that has nothing to do with franchise cricket. There are geographical and historical reasons for those issues. Coaching is also a real problem and it will take a generation to transform that because we have pushed all our senior coaches out, that intellectual capital is gone,” Pybus said.