SA set to give it Horns

HROUGHOUT this tour to England, whether in interviews, general conversations or tweets by players and the team management, reference has been made to the four days they all spent in the Swiss Alps with explorer Mike Horn.

They rode bicycles, climbed mountains and jumped off waterfalls, all with the aim of building up unity. There was a deeper level to that exercise, though. The sense of testing themselves, finding their boundaries as people and pushing beyond what they had assumed were their limitations.

It had a profound effect on the players, as people mainly, but as cricketers too, with the most tangible “result” probably coming in the shape of Hashim Amla’s triple century in the first Test at The Oval – a feat no South African cricketer had achieved before. It was also illustrated in that tense final day of the Lord’s Test, when England made a spirited pursuit of the seemingly impossible, but South Africa hung on, and eventually prevailed.

Gary Kirsten remarked the next day that he believed that victory and the way it was achieved could have a much broader impact for the players. “There is incredible learning out of that,” Kirsten said of the manner of the Lord’s win. “To be put in that situation and to overcome it and win it, especially for this South African team, where we’ve had some scarring in the shortened formats of the game in the past, to come through that, will be big for those players.”

Which brings me to the World T20 Championships, and South Africa’s pursuit of an ICC trophy and the cloud that hangs over them every time they go to one of those events. Kirsten, interestingly, has chosen this week to take a short “break” with his family. There’ll be a few people in South Africa who may want to question the timing of the “break”, but it is important to note that we are dealing with a group of adults here, professional sportsmen who won’t suddenly go off the rails because the principal is absent.

Kirsten expressed his interest at seeing “how the ship runs” in his absence and “how it unfolds”. He is confident that South Africa’s preparations are well on track, and from a form and personnel perspective that appears to be the case.

For South Africa, though, it’s a “mind game”, because at World Cups past – 50-over versions or the 20-over ones – whether home or away, they’ve always been among the favourites, and will be again now, but it’s about coming through the tight situations in a knock-out game. They can’t know how they’ll react, but they’ll think back to the tests they survived with Horn in the Alps and believe they can. Kirsten, it appears, certainly does.

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