“I’m definitely not a betting man. I trust the quality of the players.” – Rob Walter
Telford Vice / Cape Town
NO to Rassie van der Dussen, Matthew Breetzke and Lungi Ngidi. Yes to Quinton de Kock, Anrich Nortjé and Marco Jansen. If you didn’t know whether Rob Walter was a gambler, you do now.
The experienced and respected Van der Dussen was among the top 10 run-scorers in this year’s SA20 and CSA T20 Challenge. Only Babar Azam has made more runs in the format in the world this year. But Van der Dussen has not cracked Walter’s nod for the T20 World Cup in the United States and the Caribbean in June.
Neither has Breetzke, who was the third-highest runscorer in the SA20 and the highest in the T20 Challenge. Nor Ngidi, despite taking more wickets than all but five other fast bowlers in the SA20.
But De Kock has been included even though he looks jaded and is having an under-par IPL, where he is 27th on the runscoring charts. Nortjé is also at the tournament, and has an economy rate of 13.36 — maybe because he was sidelined by a lumbar stress fracture from last September to March this year. Jansen, too, is at the IPL, although you might not have noticed considering he has played one match.
Walter denied, during a press conference on Tuesday, that his squad was the product of a long night at the roulette wheel: “I’m definitely not a betting man, never have been. But I trust the quality of the players. Anrich has another month before the World Cup starts, so no doubt he’ll hit his straps. It’s good to see that his speed is up and, with playing and more time training, he’ll start to get his feel back. It’s the same with Marco. Again, Quinny is a quality cricketer. We’ve seen him do the job time and time again for us.”
How did Walter, South Africa’s white-ball coach and so the sole selector in those formats, go about making up his mind? “There are various criteria — performances this year, performances over the last year, historical performances further back than that, the make-up of squads, the potential conditions that we are going to have to balance. And then there’s the good old-fashioned coach’s gut feeling.”
There’s also subjectivity, to which all of us are prone. It’s easy to look past the fact that 18 players in the SA20 and 22 in the T20 Challenge scored faster than Van der Dussen. And that while Ngidi was ruled out of the IPL with his own lumbar problem, he doesn’t offer Nortjé’s ability to bowl at 150 kilometres an hour. And that De Kock, even though he is out of sorts, has passed 50 three times in nine innings at the IPL.
Taking aim at individuals in a squad isn’t difficult. Making an alternative case that takes into account a side’s balance, the strengths and weaknesses of their opponents and the likely conditions is a stiffer challenge.
“I’ve chatted to probably 30-plus players in the last three days around selection and non-selection,” Walter said. “We do our best to communicate with those who we feel were in the mix and who were close to selection but didn’t quite get there. As much as it’s nice to make good phone calls, I really feel for the guys who miss out. You’ve got good people working hard on their games to live their dream of going to a World Cup. I’m the one who has to tell them that’s not going to happen. It’s not easy for me but it’s a lot harder for them to deal with that reality.”
The squad to play three T20Is against West Indies in the Caribbean before the World Cup was also named, pending changes that could depend on which South Africans are available after the league stage of the IPL. This squad includes Van der Dussen, Ngidi and Nqaba Peter, the 21-year-old leg spinner who lit up an otherwise dowdy T20 Challenge by taking 20 wickets in 10 games at an average of 9.50 and an economy rate of 5.84.
Walter is allowed to make changes to the World Cup squad until May 25. That seems unlikely, but those who have missed out and will be part of the Windies series wouldn’t be human if they didn’t hope something happens to change the coach’s mind.
More criticism is sure to come Walter’s way because the World Cup 15 includes only six players of colour, just one of them black — a situation exacerbated by the exposure of Temba Bavuma’s unsuitability to the demands of batting in the format. Bavuma, who is black, was South Africa’s captain during their disastrous 2022 T20 World Cup campaign.
Remedies are not easy to see. Rivaldo Moonsamy and Sibonelo Makhanya were among the top 10 runscorers in the T20 Challenge, but how do they win a place if Van der Dussen doesn’t? Simu Simetu was the leading wicket-taker in that competition, and like Keshav Maharaj and Bjorn Fortuin he is a left-arm orthodox spinner.
“My number one imperative is to create a winning Proteas team,” Walter said. “In order to do that, every time I pick a side I’ve got to pick the best team at the time that I think will give us a chance of doing that. That said, the [domestic] system needs to up the ante so that in six months, 12 months or two years’ time, and in particular when we reach the 2027 World Cup at home, the demographics of our team are different.
“Outside of the World Cup we’ll continue to use our bilateral series to do exactly that — to grow our base of players, to create international opportunity, to give opportunity for players to take their skills to a higher level, and make sure that we’ve bought into and are delivering on a process that’s going to change what our team looks like as we move forward.”
Walter is white, which in racially riven South Africa will increase scrutiny of his decisions. But even though the buck stops with him, it first has to get past CSA’s director of cricket, Enoch Nkwe, who is black. “No squad that I pick is selected without discussion with the director of cricket; it’s as simple as that,” Walter said.
It isn’t that simple, of course. South Africa’s World Cup squads in 1992, 1996 and 1999 each included one brown but no black players. Five black and brown players were picked for the 2003 ODI World Cup and the 2010 version of what is now called the T20 World Cup. The 2011 World Cup squad and the 2009, 2012 and 2016 T20 selections featured six black and brown players each. There were seven at the 2007 and 2015 World Cups, and at the 2007, 2021 and 2022 T20 versions. Eight made it to the 2014 T20 tournament, and to the 2019 and 2023 World Cups; the latter also chosen by Walter.
Not one of those squads, staffed by South Africa’s finest players, all of them — whatever their race — among the best in the global game, won a trophy. So maybe Walter should be taken seriously when he says he’s not a gambler. What is he?
A clue could be seen on the wall behind Walter’s right shoulder as he spoke to reporters from New Zealand, where he and his family live. It was a wooden sign, and it read: “Dream big.”
South Africa men’s squads:
T20 World Cup: Aiden Markram (capt), Ottniel Baartman, Gerald Coetzee, Quinton de Kock, Bjorn Fortuin, Reeza Hendricks, Marco Jansen, Heinrich Klaasen, Keshav Maharaj, David Miller, Anrich Nortjé, Kagiso Rabada, Ryan Rickelton, Tabraiz Shamsi, Tristan Stubbs. Travelling reserves: Nandré Burger, Lungi Ngidi.
T20I series against West Indies: Ottniel Baartman, Matthew Breetzke, Bjorn Fortuin, Reeza Hendricks, Patrick Kruger, Wiaan Mulder, Lungi Ngidi, Nqaba Peter, Ryan Rickelton, Andile Phehlukwayo, Tabraiz Shamsi, Rassie van der Dussen.
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Bulletproof Truth 