After his team crashed out of the Twenty20 World cup tournament, a lot sooner than everybody thought, the national team’s coach from South Africa, wants a change in approach from his players:
“We won’t win the World Cup in 2011 if we continue like this. We’ll have to change our approach. We cannot keep repeating the same errors and not make changes.”
The team had players prepared for the Twenty20 world cup by playing in the IPL but even with that, they got knocked out early. He said that “few hard calls” will have to be made to achieve the results that is expected of the team. He added:
“I don’t want to come down on individuals, but the time is right for change. We have to sit down and think about what is important to change and which players are the right ones to fit in with that change. If we need to make a few hard calls, it will be done.”
He tried to identify the cause of the problems and why his team may have failed to get to the semifinals.
“We again could not cope with the pressure. The question has to be asked why we could not manage it and why it happens repeatedly. Is it our approach to batting, is it our general approach, or are we maybe too tentative? Those are the questions you need to ask yourself. We never reached the kind of form that allowed us to charge. If we performed well in one area, we performed poorly in another. As a team we did not perform well in all three disciplines.”
“We need to find out exactly why they were so under par, and what can be done to improve the situation,” Andrew Hudson, newly-appointed convenor of selectors, was quoted as saying by the Sport 24 website.
Wait, Andrew what?? Oh.. All of the above were about South Africa and by their coach Van Zyl?. I thought for a second, since the cricket world revolves around India alone, the above statements were about India’s failures at the world cup. So, there was another top notch team that was expected to do well, didn’t? Who woulda thunk? 🙂
Courtesy: Cricinfo
The Cricket Couch 