IND vs SA | Virat Kohli and his men will have some level of regret, says Boeta Dippenaar

India lost the three match Test series in South Africa by 2-1 on Friday as South Africa won the third Test in Cape Town by seven wickets and registered a victory. India’s Test squad has been performing well when they toured Australia and England last year. 

“We will probably still see a new era of Virat Kohli post captaincy in the Indian cricketing colours. In the twilight of his career, he will be much better than before, if he doesn’t have the burden of captaincy.” 

“It’s an incredible victory for South Africa because we know how they started the series, how their players’ forms were. I think very few people touted South Africa as the winners ahead of the series. Even I myself thought that India would win the series. India had the chance to win their maiden Test series in South Africa, but they missed out on the opportunity. But credit goes to South Africa. South African players showed more character than the Indian team. This was the major difference between the two teams,” he stated.

“The animosity in the (South African) board room certainly helped to unify the team to say – we are on our own, we need to stand together and support each other. This helped this largely inexperienced team to overcome a very good and experienced Indian team.” 

“India’s batting was problematic. Indian batsmen weren’t consistent. It also takes great skills to bowl on a South African wicket. Because the SA wickets are more helpful to the bowlers. You need to force a batsman to play forward and towards the mid-off area. Indian bowlers were bowling either too full or too short and weren’t consistent with their lengths. If you watch Kagiso Rabada, he managed to hit that line and length regularly and better than Indian bowlers. Keegan Peterson was awesome. He managed to tackle the Indian pace bravely,” he explained. 

An incident regarding the ball-tracking technology saw Indian player expressing their frustration on stumps mic. Elgar looked OUT LBW with a naked eye but the decision was reversed as the ball-tracking technology showed the ball missing the stumps due to bounce. Reflecting on the incident, Dippenaar admitted that the DRS is not 100 percent accurate. 

“I am not convinced that DRS is 100 percent accurate. I have seen one or two deliveries where the ball pitched with an impact with the pad and then the subsequent tracking just didn’t make sense (with) the angle with which the ball proceeded. So, it is always difficult to say. We live in an imperfect world. In my opinion, as a whole, DRS has certainly improved with decision making. They are not giving blatantly wrong decisions that we saw in the past.”