"Once AB [de Villiers] goes and Faf [du Plessis] goes — JP’s [Duminy] already gone — and Hashim [Amla] is also going to go ..." - Brad Bing
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
Sunday Times
DALE Benkenstein bats for both sides. As a coach at Hilton College he knows what goes into the sausage machine. As South Africa’s freshly appointed batting coach he knows what comes out the other end.
And he’s concerned that there’s sawdust in the boerewors.
“I’ve been involved in schools cricket for a year now and the talent pool is amazing, phenomenal: the school system is still producing cricketers consistently,” Benkenstein said.
“After school is a bit of a worry — what happens to guys then? Club cricket seems to have gone downhill and the academy system isn’t really working in all provinces.
“There seems to be a void and that worries me, because batsmen take longer to mature and you can lose a whole percentage of batsmen in that 18-to-21 year-old period.
“Some guys mature later and they could be your top players. That’s an area in which I’d like to see if we can improve things.”
Benkenstein spoke the day before Cricket South Africa (CSA) proclaimed the “huge impact on the broadening of the talent pool at youth level” their system of community hubs and regional performances centres (RPC) was, they said, having on the game.
“There has been absolute explosion of talent coming through this year and the number of players selected for the youth tournaments has rocketed to 243 [up from 136 last year],” a release quoted CSA’s cricket general manager, Corrie van Zyl, as saying.
“This is a huge increase by any standards and will strengthen our resolve to give more children from our non-traditional feeder systems the chance to excel.”
The suits tend to cop it in these pages, but there is no question they have put much effort and devoted their best expertise into ensuring that junior cricket is healthy.
It’s what happens next that’s the challenge.
“Clubs are struggling and the more they do the more the structure is starting to collapse,” said Brad Bing, who has been part of cricket in many capacities and levels and is the managing director of Sporting Chance, a Western Cape coaching network.
“And they’ve taken away B section cricket. So the incentive to continue if you weren’t in an academy was zero.
“Anyway, there are players who come from academies who don’t make the grade because they haven’t played club cricket, where their issues would have been sorted out.
“When they took away the hopes of players in a structured club set-up to play B section cricket, they killed a lot of dreams. With that came killing the depth of talent.
“The worst part is when guys are out of form. Where do they go back to? You can’t go back to amateur cricket because you’re too old and you can’t go back to club cricket because it’s not as strong as it should be.”
Bing sees those chickens coming home to roost soon.
“Once AB [de Villiers] goes and Faf [du Plessis] goes — JP’s [Duminy] already gone — and Hashim [Amla] is also going to go …
“Those are four bloody good players, two of them world class in Amla and De Villiers, and there’s not enough players coming through to take their place.”
Aiden Markram?
“He can play but he’s one guy.”
Which is where Benkenstein comes into the spotlight: “The batting coach is going to be under huge pressure once those guys retire.”
At 43, Benkenstein is old enough to remember the sausage machine Bing described. Perhaps there was no sawdust then, but there was probably more fat.
And more meat and spices, and with that more flavour.
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