Times Media
TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg
Next season, if you change the channel on the world’s only surviving black-and-white television set to see Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers and Faf du Plessis all discussing what SA should do next, you might need to know which format is being played to work out who is the captain.
Amla’s tenure as SA’s test captain starts in Sri Lanka next month. De Villiers leads the one-day team. Du Plessis is in charge of the T20 outfit. All of them are important members of all three teams.
If Amla, De Villiers and Du Plessis are likely to always be on the field together, why not pool the resources they bring? The age of the super skipper could be upon us ...
Not so fast, former test batsman Peter Kirsten said yesterday: “Three is a bit confusing for all concerned. When it gets tight and hot out there you don’t want three conflicting opinions on what to do. You want your leader to be in charge.”
Kirsten said he would have preferred two captains - Du Plessis in the tests and T20s and De Villiers in the ODIs.
“The players will have to get used to three different styles of captaincy,” Kirsten, who led the rebel-era SA team to 13 wins in the two existing formats in his 20 matches at the helm, said.
That the issue is being debated which piqued interest is a reflection of Graeme Smith’s towering shadow of influence on the national team. Smith captained SA in 284 of the 347 matches he played for them between April, 2003 and March this year.
“We’ve been spoilt by Graeme captaining in all formats for most of his career, but we’re lucky to have three astute guys to take it forward,” Kirsten said.
The early focus when SA tour Sri Lanka next month to play two tests and three ODIs will be on the fallout from De Villiers saying, on May 15, that he “would love to” be SA test captain and was “certainly ready for it”. On June 3, Amla was unveiled in the job.
“AB will be feeling a bit peeved, so it will be interesting to see how that pans out,” Kirsten said. “But Hashim is going to be a calming influence. He has always come across as a reluctant leader, so well done to Cricket SA for talking him into it.”
Asked whether a different captain in each format would work for SA, Shaun Pollock - who led the Proteas in 26 tests, 92 ODIs and a T20 - said he did not “really have an opinion” but offered that he was “not convinced that it is good”.
Inside the current dressingroom, which is trying to absorb and recover from the partial or complete retirements of Mark Boucher, Jacques Kallis, and Smith, the view was different.
“For where the team is at the moment, it’s probably a blessing in disguise,” SA team manager Mohammed Moosajee said.
“The fact that you have guys complementing each other in the different formats lessens the burden but it also gives them the responsibility to bring their character and their personality to the team environment.”
South Africans will have their first chance to see how that works in the first ODI in Colombo on July 6.
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