Proteas must knuckle down to get back up

BROAD(LY) speaking, our goose was well and truly Cook(ed) at the Wanderers cricket ground on Saturday.

The English side had a top-class Cook to dish up a splendid meal of cricket and perhaps the Proteas could call on a Cook (Stephen) to see if he can garner up a dish to counter the English cuisine.

Jokes aside, I do not feel that this England side are as good as we are making them out to be. Make no mistake, I congratulate them on beating the supposed No 1 Test-playing country, but then that is no great shakes as Bangladesh gave us a fright and then India trounced us, admittedly on typical Indian spinning tracks.

What the Englishmen did was apply themselves firstly to the conditions and secondly to the basics of the game. It is a given that catches win matches and I am afraid that South Africa have simply lost the art of catching, and their fielding in general is well below the benchmark set by former South African sides.

Our batsmen are being played out of position, injuries are becoming commonplace and this begs one to ask about the general fitness of the players.

Our bowlers, with the occasional exceptional performance, are not bowling to a set plan; not using the conditions to their advantage. Our batsmen, well, that is a different story as, with few exceptions, they are just not getting it right. It is high time this country introduced qualified coaching cricket academies to find the players who are prepared to do the job.

In the last six Tests, we have managed to scrape two draws – one thanks to the rain and the other to a batsmen’s paradise (Newlands). The other four, we have lost within three days, and on two or three occasions, have scored less than 100 and barely reached 200 in the others.

As I have done before, I must once again ask whether the players are committed to the task that is placed before them, and also what our rather sizeable coaching staff are doing about the dismal displays being produced?

I want to see our side back on top (for what the statistics are worth, I reckon we are ranked about fifth or sixth at the moment), and to achieve this, our players have to knuckle down, get the basics right and then get on with this great game of cricket.

Diep River, Western Cape