South Africa head coach Mark Boucher has on Monday (September 21) made it clear that a decision on the team’s new Test captain will be officially announced once the new convenor of selectors is chosen.
The Proteas team has been without Test captain since Faf du Plessis stepped down from the position earlier this year, while Cricket South Africa (CSA) is yet to name a replacement for Linda Zondi as convenor of selectors and Boucher hopes the convenor will be elected soon.
However, the head coach has confirmed that limited-overs skipper Quinton de Kock will not be captaining the Test side as they are looking to pick someone else for the role while revealing that the Proteas side will follow the model used by Australia and England, who have different captains for Test and white-ball formats.
Boucher said in a CSA statement on Monday: “We’ve had a lot of conversations and a lot of time to think about what we want to do. We’ll look to select someone else for the Test role. One of the things that we’ve learned from England is a guy like Eoin Morgan comes in and he’s got a lot of time to plan because he’s not involved in the Test team.”
The coach further noted, “So that’s positive, you get a captain who can sit down and really plan what he wants and how to drive that vision to the players. It gives you some freshness when there’s a short turnaround between formats.”
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Pointing out De Kock has “too much workload to handle”, Boucher said the team “management will look for a new face” to bring freshness in the limited-overs side.
Former Proteas cricketer further explained, “Sometimes when a player and especially the captain is involved in all three formats, it can be an automatic swap from format to the other because there's not a lot of time in between. So that''s positive, you get a captain who can sit down and really plan what he wants, and he can try to drive that vision to the players, and it gives you some freshness when there's a short turnaround time between the formats.”
He also revealed that De Kock is not keen to lead the Test side, adding: “The last conversation I had with Quinny around this topic was in India (in March) where he felt the workload was going to be a little high for him.”
Boucher signed off by saying, “Whoever is the (test) captain will probably use Quinny’s brain to good effect because as a keeper you see things from probably the best angle.”
(With Reuters Inputs)
