Marco Jansen and Gerald Coetzee are expected to be back in action by November after being rested for South Africa’s white-ball tour of the UAE, where they will play Afghanistan and Ireland. The pair are a third of the way through a 12-week conditioning block as part of a CSA plan to manage the bowlers and help them recover from or prevent injury.
Neither has played for South Africa since June, with Jansen rested from the West Indies Tests and Coetzee injured just before the matches. Currently, Jansen has a shoulder concern and Coetzee a hip issue, but even before those niggles, CSA had recognised the need to give them a break as part of a broader strategy to keep bowlers at their best.
“Both of these young players were presenting with chronic physiological and physical things that are predisposed to fast bowling and so we realised that we had to step in. We have to give these guys the best chance of being able to perform,” Rob Walter, South Africa’s white-ball coach, said. “Obviously the workload on young cricketers has gone through the roof, especially guys who bowl fast. In order to ensure that their injuries didn’t put up the stop sign [on their careers], we wanted to put them on a conditioning block.”
Similarly, South Africa are giving premier quick Kagiso Rabada an extended period of time off ahead of a busy period of Test cricket, which will start with two matches against Bangladesh in October. CSA is currently waiting on a security assessment to confirm the team’s travel to Bangladesh – the women’s T20 World Cup was moved out of the country to the UAE following political tensions – but expect to play the series at a neutral venue. That will be followed by two Tests against each of Sri Lanka and Pakistan before the SA20, Champions Trophy and IPL, leaving this as the only viable time to rest Rabada.
“If you look at what he has in store for him, starting from when the Bangladesh Test series starts, it’s non-stop cricket,” Walter said. “When KG puts on a jersey for South Africa, we want him to be delivering his best and we’ve seen that when his pace is up, that’s when he’s most impactful and effective. It’s just not possible to keep expecting him to do that if we don’t provide these rest, recovery and conditioning windows. This was a perfect time to give him that opportunity. We don’t have a lot of Test matches so to have our best bowlers available and firing for Test cricket is absolutely imperative. So there’s a collaboration between myself and Shukri [Conrad – the red-ball coach] to make sure that that happens.”
“The reality is we can’t rely on one group of players to win games for South Africa and so the players that you see in the squad are either high potential players that we believe can make big contributions for South Africa moving forward, or the next best players in the country”
Rob Walter
In Rabada’s absence, Lungi Ngidi and Ottneil Baartman will lead the pace attack in the UAE with Anrich Nortje, who opted out of a national contract as he works his way back from stress fractures, also omitted. Nortje played at the T20 World Cup 2024, but there is no indication of when he will consider representing South Africa in longer formats.
South Africa are also resting their two frontline spinners, Keshav Maharaj and Tabraiz Shamsi, and middle-order batters David Miller and Heinrich Klaasen, in the UAE as they look to deepen the player pool ahead of more anticipated schedule clashes. The tri-series in Pakistan ahead of next year’s Champions Trophy is one example, as it will coincide with the SA20 knockouts and so, South Africa will not have a first-choice squad available. To prepare for that, they are broadening the international player base on their UAE trip.
“The reality is we can’t rely on one group of players to win games for South Africa and so the players that you see in the squad are either high potential players that we believe can make big contributions for South Africa moving forward, or the next best players in the country,” Walter said. “We want to make sure that we have a bigger group of players that can win games for South Africa. If we want to keep relying on the same faces to do that, what happens with injury, what happens with retirement, what happens in all those instances? The only way to know is to keep exposing players to international cricket.”
