Ken Borland

Keshav Maharaj has been one of the consistently brilliant performers for the Proteas this year and also took to the stand-in captaincy with aplomb, but he admitted that he and his fellow leaders in the squad will be restless sleepers when it comes to automatic qualification for the next ODI World Cup following their series loss in Sri Lanka.

South Africa were beaten by 78 runs in the third and decisive ODI on Tuesday night, meaning they took just 10 points out of a possible 30 from the series. That leaves them languishing in ninth place in the standings, with the top eight qualifying automatically for the World Cup in India in 2023. Sri Lanka, meanwhile, have leapfrogged the Proteas into fifth place, eight points ahead of them.

“It is a bit concerning, we have to start winning series and taking care of those points. The first two games were very good in terms of how the batting approached playing spin-bowling, we scored a lot of runs. But tonight was disappointing and we need to reassess how we bat when the ball is turning a bit more. There was more turn and bounce today, but Sri Lanka bowled really well though.

“Maybe we need to change our mental strategy and approach, but I’m sure it’s not a lack of skills because the batsmen have worked very hard on that. But also maybe we focused a bit too much on spin tonight and were caught a bit unawares by their pace bowler [Dushmantha Chameera]. Not many teams lose four wickets in the powerplay and still win, even though I thought 203 was a fair score to chase,” Maharaj said after the Proteas were bundled out in only 30 overs for just 125.

Coach Mark Boucher admitted to struggling to get the right team balance on the night, with the two seam-bowling all-rounders, Wiaan Mulder and Andile Phehlukwayo, bowling just two overs between them and scoring a combined tally of only 19 runs. But a fair arbitrator would surely also point to the difficulties caused by quotas when it comes to balancing a team, especially with two Black African stars not available in Temba Bavuma and Lungi Ngidi.

And the first question Boucher was asked in the post-match press conference was whether he was happy with the balance of the side from a transformation perspective. To which he simply answered “Yes”.

“We needed to play an extra spinner and that threw us a bit. But with the rain, Anrich Nortje would have been a handful on that pitch as well. We wanted three seamers too and the batting is full of guys who have been in good form too. In hindsight, an extra batsman today would have been nice, but losing four wickets in the first 10 overs means we were always going to be under pressure no matter how deep our batting,” Boucher later explained.

Sharks coach Sean Everitt will be a restless sleeper this week as he considers the high penalty count recently against his team as they head for their last two round-robin fixtures of the Currie Cup.

The Sharks are currently second on the Currie Cup log, four points behind the Bulls, and they close their regular season by visiting the Lions on Saturday and then hosting Western Province on August 28.

But the Sharks had a double-figure penalty count against them in the first half of their match against the Bulls and were similarly ill-disciplined at the weekend against the Free State Cheetahs. Even though the Cheetahs had suffered a red card early in the second half, they stayed in the game thanks to the Sharks’ lack of focus and the KwaZulu-Natalians finished the 38-31 win with 13 men thanks to two yellow cards in the closing minutes.

“We’re very happy with the five points against the Cheetahs, but there are two work-ons we have to get right before playing the Lions in Johannesburg. The first is our set-pieces and the second is the number of penalties we are conceding. Those are due to individual errors and not system faults. Up to the Bulls game we had conceded the least penalties in the competition.

“After the last two games we are probably sitting top of that list now. We can’t defend for the majority of a game due to discipline issues, we need to take the pressure off ourselves if we are going to play free-flowing rugby. We need to rectify the number of penalties we’re conceding because we won’t have enough possession if we keep giving away penalties,’ Everitt said.

Nevertheless, the Sharks did score six tries against the Cheetahs, exciting wing Thaakir Abrahams scoring twice, and some of their attacking play would have been enough to make the coach purr with delight.

“Thaakir is always a threat with ball in hand, he poses big problems for the opposition. It was unfortunate that we had an injury in the warm-up and Marnus Potgieter [hamstring] was not able to take the field, but we were very fortunate to be able to bring in someone like Yaw Penxe, who has been with the Springboks.

“It was Le Roux Roets’ third game in a row so he’s getting that consistency now and he was massive in his ball-carries and setting the maul, while it was also good to see Cameron Wright back on the field and Boeta Chamberlain get a start. Dylan Richardson is blessed with an engine that can just go and go, he had a big impact defensively and with his ball-carries,” Everitt said.