adminADELAIDE. — Temba Bavuma is likely to reconsider his position as South Africa’s cricket captain in the wake of his team’s dismal performance in their ICC Men’s T20 World Cup match against the Netherlands in Adelaide yesterday.
The Dutch, who were clear under-dogs going into the game, shocked the cricket world by winning by 13 runs to dump South Africa, who were among the favourites to lift the trophy, out of the running for a place in the semi-finals.
Bavuma’s team were heavily favoured to prevail over a side they had beaten in all five of their completed white-ball matches. But they froze in the headlights of the fact that they needed to win or at least not lose in order to reach the knockout rounds.
Flaccid bowling allowed the Netherlands to reach 158/4, and even flatter batting limited the South Africans to a reply of 145/8. Would that make Bavuma resign as captain? “To be considering that now, a lot of it would be emotional,” Bavuma said. “It’s probably something I will think about. I’ll speak to the relevant people.”
Bavuma’s fate could be decided for him. The tournament was Mark Boucher’s last as South Africa’s coach. Boucher’s successor could decide to relieve Bavuma of the job, as he conceded: “I’ll have to see who comes in as coach. When you have changes like that they come in with their own style, and they might find a different leader to execute whatever vision and style of play that they have.
“But it would be emotional now if I thought about all of that. Whatever happens I think I’ve carried myself with dignity through all the good and the bad times. If I were to leave I would leave with my pride intact.”
Bavuma did not expressly say he would look to stay in the role, which can only mean he is thinking of walking away. If nothing else, that would mean an end to the often disrespectful criticism he is subjected to in the legitimate media as well as in less credible social media circles – which would have to bear at least some of the blame for Bavuma’s and South Africa’s failures.
“Mentally, yeah, it does eat at you as a player,” he said. “You try and manage your mental space as much as you can and try control what gets to you. But unfortunately with social media and people these days, whatever is said out there always gets to you.
“I’ve always tried to keep a level head through all the good and the bad times. I’ve tried to be as close to myself as possible. Not just for myself but for this group. We are going to be taking on flak, and probably rightly so. But we’re going to have to find a way to bounce back. I’m going to have to find a way to bonce back, and try get back to the good old days.”
Bavuma’s detractors, fair and unfair, will argue that he doesn’t have good days to look back on as a T20I player. After 32 innings he has scored 635 runs with only one half-century and has a strike rate of just 116.08 in a format in which the benchmark for frontline batters is 140. He scored 70 runs in five innings at the World Cup, 36 of them in one innings, at a rate of 112.90. Rilee Rossouw, Quinton de Kock, Aiden Markram and David Miller scored more runs than Bavuma in the tournament, and except for Tristan Stubbs, all of South Africa’s frontline batters had a better strike rate.
But not even a world record batting display from Bavuma would likely have saved South Africa from defeat in a match in which they failed abjectly with bat and ball, as Bavuma admitted: “A lot went wrong. With a performance like that you can pick a lot of things, from the toss when we opted to bowl first. When you make a decision like that you expect us to put them under pressure with the ball. We didn’t do that, and that didn’t back up that decision.
“That being said, we still had the responsibility with the bat. We just could get any type of momentum or flow into our innings. We couldn’t adapt to the slow nature of the pitch. They made use of the dimensions of the field a lot better than we did, forcing us to hit a lot more straight to the longer boundaries.
It’s disappointing for all of us. Probably the most disappointing thing is not being able to get over the line when we needed to.” — Cricbuzz.
Online Reporter