South African cricket needs to rebuild to be great again, states Faf du Plessis
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Faf du Plessis has broken his silence about the ongoing state of unrest in the entire South African cricket setup. With Thabang Moroe dethroned as the chief executive of Cricket South Africa (CSA) board, they are in dire need of a stable structure right ahead of the England series.
With Moroe suspended, CSA named Jacques Faul as chief executive, on Saturday, but only in an acting capacity. Meanwhile, they hope to confirm Graeme Smith as their Director of Cricket on Wednesday, December 11. South Africa captain du Plessis believes in the newly forming structure of South African cricket, even though it’s untested.
While the board has their only relief with du Plessis remaining the captain of the side, they need to form a stable unit before the focus shifts to cricket alone. The new power structure was embarked three weeks ago and du Plessis believes that CSA only have little time before international cricket commences full-fledged.
"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,” du Plessis 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.”
With England set to tour South Africa, starting on December 26, the focus should be on grooming the team to face the good old opponents. Last time the team toured South Africa, they gave the hosts a hard time and this time du Plessis’ team would want to take their long due revenge by beating them.
"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. It's been a little bit paused for the last two or three weeks, which is already too late,” frets Faf.
"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."
