Johannesburg - As the runs required for Bangladesh to make history on Wednesday ticked down into single fingers, Temba Bavuma was already trying to figure out how the heck this had all happened.
In reflecting on his side’s 2-1 defeat in a press conference afterwards he was almost apologetic about referencing his side’s 3-0 clean sweep of India two months ago. That was the blueprint for the Proteas in the 50-over format. Back then they played with intensity, flair, and showed the resilience that he has demanded.
It was absent against Bangladesh, and Bavuma couldn’t fathom why that was the case.
“I was asking myself from the first game why we’d performed so poorly because the standards and intensity against India were on another level,” he said in his television interview. “Was it complacency? Were we expecting things to happen?”
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Fifteen minutes later in his virtual interaction with the rest of the media, he was still unclear. “From a confidence point of view, again I have to reference the India series, coming out of that series there was a lot of confidence and belief amongst the guys individually and as a team,” said South Africa’s limited overs captain.
“Maybe it could have been a case of us not paying respect to the processes which allowed those positive results to come about and just expecting things to go our way. That’s at the top of my head. It’s still a question to ask myself and a question that will remain relevant in the series’s ahead.”
Bavuma praised Bangladesh’s skill and execution, the clarity of their gameplans and the way they went about implementing them, and wondered again why his side was incapable of doing what they’d discussed in the various strategy meetings.
A historic triumph for Tamim Iqbal’s Tigers, was conversely a catastrophic defeat for the Proteas. Head coach Mark Boucher didn’t want to suggest personnel changes were needed; the side actually tried that in this series, dropping the out of form Aiden Markram and the inconsistent Andile Phehlukwayo. It didn’t help much in the third match where South Africa were trounced.
Taskin Ahmed may have finished as the leading wicket-taker, but Boucher reflected on the tentative nature of South Africa’s batting against Bangladesh’s spinners as an area where the home team failed. He seemed cross about the fact that they didn’t play in the way that was planned, despite having seen those plans work previously, not just against India.
“We go to Sri Lanka (in 2021) and we play spin well and then we come back to South Africa and in conditions where it was turning a bit, we just go back to the old way of playing. The belief was not there in that it’s the right way to play against that type of bowling. Maybe the fear of failure was thinking we are going to get out to it, when it is actually the right way to play,” said Boucher.
South Africa’s next ODI assignment is in England in July. A lot of IPL water will have flowed under the bridge by that time, while there’ll be many hours of head scratching ahead too.
Markram’s lack of form creates a problem regarding the team’s balance because he provides a sixth bowler option. The seam bowling all-rounder spot is a revolving door and weirdly George Linde, a spin bowling all-rounder, who played two matches in Sri Lanka, is no longer seen as an option, despite where the World Cup will be played next year.
On that point, perhaps Boucher, Bavuma and the selectors want to ensure they actually get there first because South Africa’s position on the ICC World Super League table is a precarious one.
The One-Day series was a disaster. There is a real risk now that all the optimism that emerged after the Tests and ODIs against India will completely evaporate unless the Proteas can win the two-match Test series that starts next week.