We need to move on – Gibson
Proteas coach reacts to AB’s shock retirement and weighs up selections
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 over a year before the World Cup in England.
Even so‚ South Africa’s coach could not avoid using words like shock‚ disappointing and mourning in his public reaction to De Villiers’s decision‚ which rocked world cricket last week.
But Gibson knew there was no point in 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 in Johannesburg.
“So we had a long [chat] around ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’. He reckons he is.”
That sounds as if 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 Spider-man catches.
“That’s why it was a shock to me. I suppose it was a shock to everybody else [too].
“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’d spoken about it with all the people he needed to speak to. There was no point in getting him to change his mind.
“I need to get the team together and move on; sport moves on. “Of course it’s disappointing. “He’s one of the best players in the world. He could have made a huge difference in the World Cup and he knows that.
“But he’s chosen to walk away from the game.”
Worries over the standards of domestic cricket‚ which have in many eyes fallen since Gibson played for Border‚ Griqualand West and Gauteng in the 1990s‚ probably mean that De Villiers’s replacement will be an already familiar name.
Aiden Markram‚ Theunis de Bruyn and Dean Elgar – in a one-day context – were all mentioned by Gibson‚ but he said: “We will pick guys we believe will go and perform in those conditions.”
Yes, De Villiers had diamonds on the soles of his shoes. Now we have all got to get rid of those walking blues. – TimesLIVE