Big news ahead I think for Monday’s Proteas squad announcement.
I believe AB de Villiers will be called back…. and I fear there will be a freezing of the “quota” in terms of player selection.
My reading of the AB situation was he was exhausted and needed a break but CSA wouldn’t give him that break.
Perhaps CSA has been wrong and AB was in the right. We lost the World Cup ‘19 cos they didn’t select him, even though he repeatedly made himself available – I heard so with my own two eyes and ears during press conferences.
We need him vs England as the Proteas batting line-up, while hugely talented, has been performing like amateurs in the main.
Re the “quotas”, I can’t think of any situations when a “quota” player was selected when the player was not good enough to be selected.
There might have been players slightly better than them but generally players have been high standard.
And if you look back at SA cricket history nepotism and favoritism has been huge, particularly if you look at the old school tie influence.
SA needs players of color to have a chance to gain experience and I have seen in 40 years watching cricket how selections don’t care about what’s fair or right – people tend to favor “their own”, in whatever way that is (race, religion, gender, school, province, hair color, looks).
More than that the problem is the Proteas batting has been woeful since AB retired…. yet most of the Proteas batters are “non-quotas”.
People aren’t seeing what our real problem is: we need to be truly competitive in all our selections but I don’t see that happening soon.
