Cardiff: South Africa coach Gary Kirsten admits his team’s liability to “choke” in the knockout stages of major tournaments hangs over them like a ‘dark mist’.
The Proteas chief, who led India to World Cup glory in 2011, was left to explain away another poor performance after they were hammered by seven wickets in Wednesday’s ICC Champions Trophy semi-final at the Oval in London.
The South African batting was blown away for just 175 after being put in to bat and England easily knocked off the runs.
The chokers tag has been attached to South African cricket since the 1990s and not even Kirsten’s embrace of the term ahead of Wednesday’s defeat was enough to inspire a turnaround.
“I think we did choke again. It’s an uncomfortable word that we’ve become comfortable with, and you have to accept that’s what it is,” Kirsten said after the match.
“It was very disappointing and this is not what we wanted. I think we had better expectations of our performances. To be blown away with the bat with the quality of batsmen we’ve got in our batting line-up is very disappointing. It’s not something that you would expect.
“If we had the secret recipe to turn it around, we would certainly package it and be selling it. We certainly give our best shot in our preparation, we try different things. But it’s definitely a dark mist that hangs over South African cricket in knockout events.
“At some point we’re going to have to try to cross the line. It’s going to require some real charisma and some real batsmen to get over the line. It might not be pretty, but at some point we have to do it to get rid of this mess.”
Kirsten added: “It is not a lack of trying to do what we can to try and lift our game. This does require an enormous amount of resilience and maybe only certain types of individuals can do it for us.”
To a query as to whether the injury to star fast bowler Dale Steyn had a big impact, Kirsten said: “We are used to not having our top players playing with us all the time. In fact, that’s what we try to do is broaden the base of our team. So we’ve had some good players come through into the team. We like to think that we can perform with anyone out there.
“I think we have to be realistic. In this tournament we ended up with one win. We have been up and down in our One-day cricket over a while — we haven’t been consistent because maybe we’ve explored quite a lot of combinations over the last two years.
“We’ve rested our Test players quite a bit to try to broaden the base of our one-day team, so there has definitely been an inconsistency to our cricket and certainly when you play in big tournaments like this, maybe you get exposed.”
When reminded that this is the eighth semi-final South Africa have lost in a global event, having only won once in the Champions Trophy in 1998, Kirsten said: “I don’t know the answers. I can only tell you we’ve given it our best shot to try to overcome it, and we haven’t. In high pressure games and pressurised environments, you want your most experienced players because they’re used to those situations. It would have been nice to have Jacques Kallis here.”
