AB quitting hit Gibson for a six
Proteas coach accepts the reality
Ottis Gibson tried hard yesterday to find the positive needles in the haystack of negativity that was dumped on cricket when AB de Villiers announced his retirement from the international arena last week – just more than a year before the World Cup in England takes place.
Even so‚ South Africa’s coach couldn’t avoid using words like “shock”‚ “disappointing” and “mourning” in his public reaction to De Villiers’s decision‚ which rocked the cricket world last Wednesday.
Gibson knew there was no point looking back wistfully at what might have been had De Villiers stayed in the mix.
“The announcement came as a shock to me, but we had a conversation – he called me the morning before the announcement and told me what he was planning to do‚” Gibson said.
“So we had a long conversation around‚ ‘are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’ He reckons that he is.”
That sounds like Gibson tried to talk De Villiers out of it. Did he? “It seemed to me that he was enjoying his cricket; we saw him in the IPL [Indian Premier League] taking Spiderman catches.
“That’s why it was a shock to me‚ and I suppose it was a shock to everybody else as well. I did say to him‚ ‘what about giving away test cricket and still playing one-day cricket with the World Cup coming up?’ He said he’s spoken about it with all the people he needed to speak to‚ and there’s no point in me trying to get him to change his mind.
“I don’t think there’s anything I could say that could get him to change his mind.”
Gibson would seem to have been granted the serenity to accept the things he cannot change‚ the courage to change the things he can change‚ and the wisdom to know the difference. “I need to get the team together and move on; sport moves on‚” said Gibson.