SA’s most reliable death bowler? Not who you might think ...

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

SA win one-day internationals more often when Rory Kleinveldt features in their death bowling partnership. However, Kleinveldt has not been selected for the three ODIs SA will play in Sri Lanka next month as the focus sharpens on preparations for next year’s World Cup.

The Proteas have emerged victorious 80% of the time when Kleinveldt has been entrusted with ball in either of the last two overs of the opposition’s innings, regardless of which team is batting first.

Dale Steyn, Lonwabo Tsotsobe and Robin Peterson are the Proteas’ next most effective grim reapers. Each of them has a winning percentage of 66.67.

Ryan McLaren weighs in at 46.67%, better than Wayne Parnell and JP Duminy - who are both pegged at 40% - but not as good as Morne Morkel’s 57.13%. Jacques Kallis’ mark is 25%.

Those numbers are drawn from the 39 completed ODIs SA have played under the coaching regimes of Gary Kirsten and Russell Domingo.

SA’s winning percentage pecking order does not dovetail with the ODI bowling rankings, where Steyn is second with Tsotsobe sixth, Morkel seventh and McLaren 20th. Kleinveldt rocks up at No. 88.

What is not in dispute is that mastering bowling at the sharp end of the innings is limited overs cricket’s toughest challenge.

“When the captain tosses you the ball at the death, you don’t come up with a plan there and then - this is something you have to work on bloody hard in the nets,” former SA and Cobras fast bowler Alan Dawson, a past master of the art, said yesterday.

“You need to have practised it against left-handers, right-handers, top order players, tailenders ... I don’t think guys practise death bowling enough. You have to spend hours at it.”

Dawson said his aim was to “cut off boundaries” rather than take wickets: “If I went for six runs in the over, I won. One-day and T20 cricket is about batting. Bowling in those formats is about damage control.”

Among Dawson’s tricks was to “slow my run-up down so I had more time to see what the batsman was going to do. I also used different parts of the crease or I changed the pace to make the batsman think I was doing something different. If he thought that, he would block the ball. If he did that, I won.”

Dawson said successful death bowling depended more on skill than talent. “But it does take a certain kind of individual to get it right because you could get hurt,” he said. “So you’ve got to be able to bounce back.”

Beuran Hendricks, who has cracked the nod for Sri Lanka, would seem to fit the bill. He has yet to earn an ODI cap but he has shown impressive composure in his five T20 internationals. Hendricks bowled at the death in four of them, and SA won two.