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South Africa’s Twenty20 international against Pakistan at Sahara Stadium Kingsmead in Durban on Friday may have been abandoned without a ball being bowled because of inclement weather but Proteas coach Russell Domingo said that valuable work had still be done while the squad was in camp.
Domingo is at a helm of a South Africa T20 team which is slowly starting to find their feet under him and new captain Faf du Plessis.
Domingo’s first series in charge saw South Africa beat New Zealand 2-1 earlier this season while the series against Pakistan will help him and his team as the Proteas continue to build to next year’s ICC World T20 in Bangladesh.
“Although we didn’t play today we have made some good progress in developing some sort of culture for our T20 set-up,” Domingo told a news conference after the Durban match was called off.
“It is still a work in progress but the foundations are being laid so that we can try and do something special and emulate the test side’s performances with a new group of players.
“It’s an exciting group of players. We’ve worked really hard these last couple of days. We are trying to devise our own culture and our own way of playing. The test team is the icon side and we all aspire to try and emulate their performances but we also need to develop our own identity,” he added.
South Africa and Pakistan will face off in the second, and final, match of the series at SuperSport Park in Centurion on Sunday and Domingo said that every match was an important part of their planning ahead of the World T20.
“It (World T20) is a year away, it is 13 T20 games away. There are going to be mistakes made in the next couple of months. There are going to be some players who maybe have to change their mindset or their ways of strategizing their game-plans and those are things that we are looking to nail down over the next 10 or 12 games,” he explained.
South Africa’s T20 management showed that they are also prepared to be flexible as they decided to allow three players, Quinton de Kock (bizhub Highveld Lions), Aaron Phangiso (bizhub Highveld Lions) and Ryan McLaren (Chevrolet Knights) to play for their franchise teams on Saturday.
The Lions and the Knights will be playing against each other in Johannesburg on Saturday and the three players will rejoin the national squad upon completion of their franchise game.
