Could be bullshit, but I'd be happy to have them on board.
Chippo
I indeed hope it is BS, Dale Steyn was an absolute disaster in the IPL - totally hopeless as it was and to have him in the T20I format is the same as Matfield. Steyn and Alberts were in the 2015 RWC. Totally unplayable and ineffective, Same as he was in the CWC in 2019,
AB de Villiers made some good runs in the IPL where he played as wicketkeeper fir Bengaluru - but in the main he was on and off and not consistent and was not in the top 20 batters in the series, A better proposition - but will he be up to standard? I doubt it very much.
In the meantime the Ozzies are about to debut another promising young gun against India. Our lot waits for a player to turn into Biltong before they let him go. Typical case was Amla at the last WC.
The Aussies routinely get rid of under-performers and replace players with new talent all the time, while in SA the exact opposite is true, Here reputation is all that counts and it is harder to get out of the Protea squads than to get in.
Lets face facts - if the past two year performances by players like Faf and Elgar was taken into account - in Australia they would have been shown the door - in SA they are institutions that must never be changed, I normally keep track of performances on international level and has found evidence of what I call the 6:1 factor - six innings of poor batting and then out of the blue a wonderful performance in one innings. That 6:1 factor applied to players like Smith and Amla as well.
Another story is insistence to stay in the team to play in the next WC - whether it is cricket or rugby, In 2015 the SA rugby squad selection was a disaster - performances on Super Rugby level and CC level were disregarded as a norm for selection and the squad ended up with at least 8 of the players being unplayable in the series. Meyer even bragged that he selects players on reputation and in fact he disregarded actual performances totally, The same happened in the 2019 CWC and we know what a disaster that one was.
Another SA invention is to select players of over 30 years of age to start a career on test, ODI and T20I level and disregard the must better younger players. In the latest squad for the SL series the method was largely discarded - probably on the insistence of Boucher and Smith - with added strength by De Kock who were pressured into being interim captain.
At least younger players were in the squad for the first time in years and I was disappointed that some of them were not used in the two tests. I think that Players like Van Tonder and Verreinne - if they played in Australia - would have been international regulars by now.
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