“All the investment, all the energies, all the focus are going to be geared towards the 2027 World Cup.” – Enoch Nkwe, CSA director of cricket
Telford Vice / Cape Town
SHUKRI Conrad and Rob Walter are indeed South Africa’s men’s teams’ new coaches. But they will have to do without Charl Langeveldt, who has been appointed Punjab Kings’ bowling coach in the latest of a series of blows to the country’s collective cricket competence.
Cricbuzz reported on Sunday that Conrad and Walter would succeed Mark Boucher as the national red-ball and white-ball coaches, which CSA confirmed on Monday. They will take up their roles on February 1 and have been contracted for four years.
The interim coaching structure that has been in place since Boucher left his position after the T20 World Cup in Australia in November — a year early to become Mumbai Indians’ head coach — will be utilised in the World Cup Super League ODIs against England in Bloemfontein on January 27, 29 and February 1.
Langeveldt should be involved for that series, and perhaps also for the first of the two Tests South Africa will play against West Indies, which are scheduled from February 28 to March 12. But, with the IPL said to be starting on March 20 and franchise staff expected to report two weeks earlier, he will then be lost to the game in South Africa.
With Langeveldt will go a level of experience and expertise that makes bowlers’ skills leap upward soon after his arrival in any dressing room. That happened in his first stint as South Africa’s bowling coach, from June 2015 to October 2017 — when former fast bowler Ottis Gibson’s appointment as head coach took away the need for a specialist in the discipline. Since Langeveldt came back on board in December 2019 — after resigning from Bangladesh’s support staff — bowling has been the team’s strongest suit by some distance.
This South Africa attack is blessed with some of the finest bowlers of the age and, particularly in Tests, they have enjoyed lively pitches. But Langeveldt’s intelligence and influence should not be overlooked. He has earned his share of the credit for Kagiso Rabada, Anrich Nortjé and Marco Jansen becoming fine cricketers.
Now, like Boucher, Langeveldt is in the departure lounge. Last week Lance Klusener pulled out of the running to coach South Africa’s white-ball side despite having reached the shortlist. On the same day Dwaine Pretorius, the country’s best white-ball allrounder at a time when few of quality have emerged, announced his retirement from international cricket. Neil McKenzie, CSA’s batting lead, left the organisation last week. Boucher, Langeveldt, Klusener, Pretorius and McKenzie hold a trove of knowledge and know-how between them, precious commodities that mid-table entities like South Africa can ill afford to lose.
The return of Walter — South Africa’s strength and conditioning expert from 2009 to 2013 who turned his hand to coaching and won three trophies with the Titans’ from 2013/14 to 2015/16 before moving to New Zealand in 2016 — helps balance that equation. He is one of few who have come back. Conrad, who presided over four franchise championships with the Lions and Cobras from 2002/03 to 2009/10 and coached South Africa to seventh place out of 16 teams at the 2022 under-19 World Cup in West Indies, has remained loyal to the game in his home country save for short stints in Uganda. But the trend is firmly in the other direction. Why? “CSA pay peanuts, tie your hands behind your back and expect miracles,” a source with intimate knowledge of the structures told Cricbuzz.
That South Africa have lost 10 of their last 15 matches across the formats won’t help CSA, and by extension Conrad and Walter, hang onto the talent they will need to try and make their teams attractive options for coaches and players who don’t want for other, better offers. The reality is that prospects like Dewald Brevis, who at 19 has become a household name for his exploits in T20 leagues, don’t need South African cricket to forge long, successful and prosperous careers. In his first three innings in the SA20, one of them a duck, Brevis scored 112 runs at a strike rate of 145.45. What are the suits doing about ensuring he plays like that for South Africa?
“There’s a lot of noise around Brevis,” Enoch Nkwe, CSA’s director of cricket, told a press conference on Monday. “We know how good he is. We might have to do the David Warner type of approach. We understand someone like Brevis has a lot of cricket to play. How do we get him to that longer format? We know that he can offer a lot to South African cricket.”
The analogy isn’t perfect. Warner made his T20I and ODI debuts without having played a first-class match, and he had just 11 first-class games under his belt when he turned out in a Test. But by then he had 40 white-ball caps for Australia. Brevis has featured in six list A games and has yet to play at first-class level, nevermind for South Africa at anything higher than under-19 level. If CSA want to give him reason to believe he is in their plans they had better pick him soon, whatever the format. The ODIs against England, and two more WCSL games against the Netherlands in Benoni and at the Wanderers on March 31 and April 2, would seem good opportunities.
Conrad and Walter will be under pressure from the start of their tenures. The Test team must win both games against West Indies to retain a fading hope of reaching the WTC final at the Oval in June. More realistically, Walter’s side are likely to need to win at least three of their five matches against England and the Dutch to be confident of direct qualification for the World Cup in India in October and November. “All the energy and focus is going to be ensuring that we qualify for the World Cup, and then get to the World Cup and do our best without losing sight of the bigger picture,” Nkwe said.
What picture could be bigger, for an ODI side, than the 2023 World Cup? The 2027 World Cup, which will be played in South Africa. CSA have hitched their wagon to that tournament in no uncertain terms, as Nkwe made plain: “It’s a massive goal, a massive milestone for us as a country. It is a must-win. All the investment, all the energies, all the focus are going to be geared towards 2027. We will have opportunities to win T20 World Cups, Champions Trophies, and World Test Championships but the focus is the 2027 World Cup.”
South Africa have never reached the final of a senior World Cup, much less won a trophy. What happens if they don’t triumph in 2027? On a day when CSA were looking ahead with hope for a brighter future, but not that far ahead, it would have been rude to ask.
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