Faf du Plessis, the Proteas captain, welcomed changes brought in by Cricket South Africa (CSA) to its power structure; bringing in Jacques Faul in an acting capacity on Saturday (December 7) to replace suspended chief executive Thabang Moroe, and hoping to soon name former skipper Graeme Smith as the director of cricket - these appointments aimed towards arresting the decline of the game at all levels through the country.
The board anticipates a loss of USD 68.3 million by the end of the 2022 rights cycle, to handle which it is pushing for some domestic game restructuring too. But immediate concerns will be regarding the yet to be appointed new coaching regime and a selection panel just days before the first Test of the summer against England starting Boxing Day in Centurion. However, Du Plessis was happy the things have at least begun getting back on track.
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"Jacques [Faul, currently the Titans franchise's chief executive] is obviously a very experienced CEO, a doctor [of sport business studies], so I am sure he is pretty clever. But it's about experience; getting people in that can take this great game of ours on the right track again," the skipper was quoted as saying by Cricbuzz.
"There's too much negative stuff that has happened over the last four, five weeks. Our cricket is too strong to have so many issues all the time."
"We are too proud a cricketing nation to be talking about this stuff all the time. The attention needs to be on the cricket and making sure we will build ourselves as a team and ourselves as an organisation to be great again."
While problems outside the field will take time to resolve, South Africa could also do with some better on-field results than the ones endured this year: suffering a league-phase exit at the World Cup in UK and being hammered left, right and centre by a dominating Indian Test side away from home. "There's not much time before the English series, so now it's about putting our focus back on to the team and making sure that the Test team gets all the things that are required for them, or for us to be successful," Du Plessis said.
"It's been a little bit paused for the last two or three weeks, which is already too late. So we need to make sure in the next week that things start unfolding to make sure the Test team gets the most attention over the next week. The last two weeks there hasn't been much attention on that so that is what we will try and drive over the next week."
"I am a firm believer that it's time for us to look ahead from all this crap [sic] that's been happening behind the scenes. It's about making sure that the players are focused on to what is the cricket side of things. The players have got absolutely nothing to do with what's happening behind the scenes," Du Plessis added.
"For me its important to separate that from a player's point of view, and if it needs me to be dealing with some of these things then that's OK. It's about getting focus on what's really important now, which is a Test series against England."
"As I said before, it's already a little bit 99 [11th hour] and things haven't happened as they should have. But now we can start getting things on the right track."
(Inputs from Cricbuzz)
