All work and all play makes SA unbeatable

October 10, 2000 by devneilmanthorp

Sel­dom has a South African team played with such con­sis­tent inten­si­ty as they did against Eng­land in Nairo­bi on Tues­day. Sel­dom has every bowler applied such pres­sure and sel­dom have all 11 field­ers pro­tect­ed the bound­ary and saved sin­gles with such passion.
The ICC Knock­out tour­na­ment is the rich­est in the sport’s his­to­ry with Shaun Pol­lock­’s squad set to return home, should they hap­pen to win, with close to R200 000 per man. But it would be churl­ish at best, and insult­ing at worst, to sug­gest they were moti­vat­ed by money.
Far more accu­rate would be to sug­gest the com­bi­na­tion of work and rest was per­fect, leav­ing all 11 play­ers feel­ing hard-trained but ener­gised and keen to take the field. Three four-hour net ses­sions in the days before the match were fol­lowed by a day of rest on Mon­day dur­ing which time aching mus­cles were soothed but enthu­si­asm for the con­test brewed.
Eng­land are sec­ond only to Aus­tralia in the amount of plea­sure they give South African teams when they are beat­en and the talk of ‘Eng­land’s revival’ did noth­ing to impress the SA nation­al team. Although none of them would ever say it, they did not believe a Test series vic­to­ry over an embar­rass­ing­ly inad­e­quate West Indies team rep­re­sent­ed a rennaissance.
Beat­ing Eng­land was very, very impor­tant to these men. They want­ed to prove a point on the field, not talk about it, and they sure­ly succeeded.
The return of Allan Don­ald was also an impor­tant fac­tor. “Just hav­ing him around makes so much dif­fer­ence,” admit­ted Jacques Kallis. “He’s a great crick­eter and when you have a ‘great’ in the team you nat­u­ral­ly feel more con­fi­dent. He has that effect on everyone.”
Gra­ham Ford and Cor­rie van Zyl must rep­re­sent the most low-pro­file coach­ing com­bi­na­tion in crick­et his­to­ry. Maybe in sport­ing his­to­ry!? Nei­ther man is inter­est­ed in plau­dits or head­lines and yet their work- rate would shame more than half the inter­na­tion­al crick­eters in the world.
It was Ford’s plan to work the play­ers like slaves for three days and then reward them with a day off. The plan worked rather well. There are still two match­es to go, and no one is remote­ly com­pla­cent, but if the var­i­ous ele­ments that com­bine to form a win­ning one-day team ‘click’ as well in the semi final as they did against Eng­land, then Saurav Gan­gu­ly’s team have no chance on Fri­day. No team would.