Why South Africa won't win the World Cup

And how they might

    As a cricket coach, Bob Woolmer was a rare fusion of clinical scientist and radical experimenter. Or maybe they are one and the same thing? His vision for the ideal World Cup squad started two years before the 1999 tournament, as clear as crystal, but he was, as always, happy to innovate to achieve it.

    “Ideally we need seven bowling options and nine batsmen in the starting XI, all with close to 50 caps, if not more,” he said when planning for his second World Cup after quarter-final elimination in 1995. It is often forgotten that South Africa won both the ICC Knockout Trophy (precursor to the Champions Trophy) and the Commonwealth Games gold medal in 1998.

    He was aware that his ‘ideal’ was a lofty goal but he reached it thanks to the raft of talented all-rounders at his disposal, some of whom he ‘created’. Lance Klusener, for example, was a rough and ready Country Districts fast bowler who’d never batted higher than number 10 in his youth career. But the coach saw the potential, cajoled and encouraged his (at the time) unorthodoxy, and delighted in one of the game’s great, modern all-rounders.

    South Africa’s 1999 ODI team was their best ever. Mark Boucher batting at number nine ensured the greatest depth in their history and, while not always having the seven bowlers he wanted, Hansie Cronje was no-part-timer as the sixth option. “If we can’t win it with this team, we may never win the bloody thing,” he said, in jest, before the tournament started. Groan.

    Just as Woolmer reinvented wicket-keeping after the introduction of TV line-calls, demystified the reverse-sweep and was the first to place an emphasis on fitness and running singles in 50-over cricket (“defend every ball and run, don’t block, and you’ve got 300”), so he foresaw the importance of all-rounders and bowlers who ‘could bat.’

    Having a lower-order of Pollock, Klusener, Boje and Boucher was an abundance of luxury and it did, occasionally, backfire with the top order not paying due attention to their game in the knowledge that there was so much insurance below. Which is one of the reasons why Klusener was player-of-the-tournament in ’99. The other was that he was bloody brilliant.

    Woolmer’s innovations and predictions for the future of the game are more relevant than ever. All-rounders are more important than ever, not just for what they can do, but because they are ‘there’. However keen Walter and his top six batsmen are to implement the game-plan of “taking the game forward” it becomes impossible to do that with such thinness lower down.

    Walter offered a different perspective on the lack of a ‘genuine’ all-rounder suggesting that it was the sum of the bowlers’ batting ability which mattered more than their individual prowess.

    “The number seven spot is key in both T20 and ODI cricket but for me, it’s assessing what the combined capability is of seven, eight and nine. Do they make up two batters? So, if I look at Marco (Jansen), we've seen him play some pivotal knocks at number seven already. And he's a guy who's only getting better and better as far as his all-around capability goes,” Walter said.

    “Sisanda’s (Magala) value with the bat is sometimes undervalued, for the Lions he's done it time and time again, under pressure. It’s certainly something that we've been working tirelessly on, his batting capability. So, if they were seven and eight then yes, on nine, ten and eleven, you know, we've put a huge amount of emphasis on their batting and ability to contribute at the back end of our batting lineup,” Walter said, not inspiring universal confidence.

    Ironically, the last team to win the World Cup using predominantly ‘specialists’ were the Australians in 1999 who had Shane Warne at eight followed by Paul Reiffel, Damien Fleming and Glenn McGrath. They had the excellent Tom Moody as the solitary, frontline all-rounder but when he was injured they played a specialist batsman (Damian Martyn) at seven and ‘fiddled’ ten overs out of the Waugh brothers, Michael Bevan and even Darren Lehmann.

    Given that the 2023 Proteas side has just one batsman (Aiden Markram) who can bowl, they cannot consider playing an extra one, unless they take the considerable gamble of banking on 10 overs of Markram’s off-spin.

    If this South African team is to become the first to win a World Cup they are going to need some career-defining performances from their specialists. At least two of the top six will probably need to score 450+ runs and the fast bowlers, of whom Walter chose six “because we want to play four pretty much all the time” will have to defy statistics and prevailing conditions to take the majority of the wickets.

    And they will have to hope that the inevitable top-order slumps don’t happen in a critical group match or, dare we say, a semi-final. If it does, many questions will be asked – as they are every four years. Like: Was Wiaan Mulder really only worth 12 ODIs before being discarded? And: Is it solely Andile Phehlukwayo’s responsibility that he has failed to progress from being the best 19-year-old all-rounder in the world?