“It is a thin line, if we overthink it or if we are underprepared.” - Linda Zondi, SA selection convenor
Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE in Johannesburg
IT’S 532 days before the winners of the 2019 World Cup will be presented with the trophy at Lord’s, English weather permitting.
But you would have thought Linda Zondi had come to the Wanderers on Thursday to pose for photographs with the silverware.
South Africa’s selection convenor wore a sharp suit of Air Force blue, a crisp white shirt, a tie strikingly striped tie, blue and white, and a pair of finely tooled tan brogues. In the buttonhole of his lapel he sported a small, perfectly formed, flower of snowy white fabric.
Good thing the trophy wasn’t around: Zondi would have upstaged it.
Not that he was there to pose for pictures. Instead he found himself explaining why Khaya Zondo had been preferred to Farhaan Behardien for the first three games of the one-day series South Africa and India will start at Kingsmead on Thursday.
It’s a fair question considering the brick Behardien has become in South Africa’s middle order, and the fact that he is having a demonstrably better list A season than Zondo.
The gist of Zondi’s answer was that Behardien might well be back for the last three matches.
And that the ticking sound he could hear in his head, he didn’t quite say, was the World Cup clock counting down.
Zondi spoke of “vision 2019” and interactions with other Cricket South Africa types in the past days have fixed on gathering every smidgen of support. Even the press are welcome aboard, apparently.
“As a collective, you guys and us, we need to make sure we bring that World Cup home,” Zondi told the gathered reporters. “We need to try by all means.”
It would seem too soon to reach for the psuedo-Churchillian stuff. Zondi almost admitted as much, but chose to err on the side of belt and braces and whatever else was needed to keep South Africa’s pants up in the, at this stage, 29 ODIs they are due to play before the World Cup: “It is a thin line, if we overthink it or if we are underprepared.”
But a lot can happen in 532 days, especially as South Africa’s schedule features series against ambitious teams like Australia and Pakistan.
The Indians, too, will make testing opponents what with the format demanding that conditions not be anywhere as pneumatic as they have been in two of the three tests.
India have won 16 of their last 20 completed ODIs and are ranked No. 2. But all of those games were played on the slow pitches of the Caribbean and Asia — where the Indians lost only two of the 31 tests they played before coming to South Africa and suffering the reality check of being hammered twice in as many matches.
The folly of India artificially inflating their No. 1 test ranking by playing, uninterrupted, in friendly conditions for a day short of two years has been brutally exposed.
But the way they have accepted the challenge posed by South African pitches, and without complaint, tells the home side they have come to play.
That said, India have won only five of their 26 completed ODIs in South Africa and none since January 2011.
The rankings are reversed going into the series: South Africa are on top.
Virat Kohli is the No. 1 batsman in the format but South Africa have four in the top 10 — AB de Villiers, Quinton de Kock, Faf du Plessis and Hashim Amla.
Imran Tahir and Kagiso Rabada are among the top 10 bowlers, as is Jasprit Bumrah.
But this, as Zondi would tell us, isn’t about numbers and rankings. It’s about trophies.
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