Crisis at SA Cricket

If it is not so frightening insofar as the future of cricket in SA is concerned one could call it a farcical prima donna show of sheer incompetence,    In the past two years the real tragedy is that the Proteas was anytime as bad as the Board itself is concerned,   So what else is possible when professional  sport is ruin by a collection of self-serving amateurs and quasi politicians whose main aim was how much they can get out of the game for their own enrichment,

So lets have a look what the previous as a route to ruin/   They drove away Standard Bank as a sponsor after the latter decided that being association with the dishonest and dismally managed SAC  could damage their reputation badly,    The situation went from bad to worse  and in the end the Minister of Sport appointed an Interim Board to oversee  bringing back to acceptable norms  insofar as  cricket management  operates.    The Interim Board is still functioning, but after things happened very slowly, the Chairman of the  Interim  Board  stepped aside due to a  tirade of his against a journalist.

Now for  the Momentum Cup series just a question – has anybody told SAC that Potchefstroom  is in a summer-rainfall  area? .   Result - less than half of the matches were in fact played.    Even one of the semi’s were not played.   The final is scheduled   for  today and another abandonment possible.

As to actual cricket played inclusive of the of the 2019 CWC – the Proteas were disastrously poor and one would thought that they cannot possibly do worse than they did - bar foe the two tests against SriLanka – when a sub-standard team was in SA and the bowling attack was near to destroyed by injuries,   One would have thought that team renewal would have taken place after the 2019 WC disaster,   Sure – there were new players brought into the team.  Those were selected on the basis of their age -  over 30 year olds were the real norm  iro selection,     Fact is the latest T20i squad to play in Pakistan  contained some new players  and  much was written about it being a young squad – but with the average age of players being  30,4 years of age.

Smith and Boucher were brought on board and so far they have not done anything to ensure revival of the team - the team itself seems to be deteriorate even further and their batting was very poor indeed,  

As to the second test against Pakistan starting today – watch out or another di saster in the making,          

Nice to see Nortje hitting 150ks and bowling like a real express bowler on the first day. But the amount of spin and bounce Maharaj extracted suggests the Pakistani spinners could be a challenge when we get to the crease.

So Nortje was too much for the Pakistani's to swallow and took 5 wickets in the first innings of the test while giving away only 56 runs in 24,3 overs bowled.    The second best bowler was not surprisingly  by Maharaj who took 3 wickets giving away 90 runs from 45 overs bowled.    The third best bowler was Mulder - who took 1 wicket and gave away 40 runs in 17 overs bowled.   The bowling performance of Rabada was disappointing - he took no wickets and gave away more runs than any of the other bowlers used.

In a way the bowlers were sabotaged by poor fielding - especially by Bavuma who missed three catches in the game.    Two were plain and simply poor catching and the third he made no effort to try and make a catch.    Any decent fielder would have taken the third catch, The other two misses really had a mayor impact on the  Pakistani scorecard,   Elgar used to be the miossed catch specialist in the team - so Bavuma now jmned him in ther ace for being th worst fielder in the team.  

Then we have the first SA innings  - Elgar out for 15 runs and Van der Dussen was  first ball duck any without any Pakistani spinners used.   Not that i am surprised at all about Elgar and Van der Dussen - they have not played any cricket in the   sub-continent before and their failure was an absolute certainty,   Faf is out for 17 runs scored and he also fell victim to medium fast bowling.   Time for their replacement in the team is long overdue,.

Bavuma is now batting and he is also useless with an average of 31 in test cricket - must be the wort specialist batsmen   any international team could have.     

Superb run out by Bavuma though.

Yes....Rabada looks burned out. Great action but the 5% that gets wickets seems to be missing at the moment. Nortje by contrast is engaged, looking  like the new Dale Steyn.

Superb run-out after missing three catches is meaningless.   He just missed another standard catch and that made it 4 in one test, 

Now Elgar joined the competition to be the worst fielder in the team,   Missed a sitter - what a farce.  

And Bavuma top scores.