“What is your strength? What has worked for us? Stick with it,” du Plessis said on ESPNcricinfo’s TimeOut show. “So what’s worked for them is they’ve had a good opening pair last year [Marsh and Markram]. And now you’re trying to fill all the holes and it’s impossible. It’s like trying to please everyone. You can’t please everyone. So stick to your strengths. Make it as simple as possible. And they’ve created… they’re trying to have Markram in the middle [order] to stabilise maybe the middle, but then you’ll be two down in the powerplay. It’s just too much.”
What du Plessis didn’t say, Steyn did.
“Pooran. Pooran is the catalyst in this,” Steyn said. “The poor form of Pooran just means that you’re moving good batters [around] to try and shepherd him. Because I think there’s a seed of doubt in the coach’s minds that they know they need to play him because of what his potential is.
“But when he doesn’t score runs, you need somebody in there. So Markram is getting thrown from where he should be as an opening batter to the middle order. Because they just want that stability over there. But they’re too scared to drop Pooran because they don’t have the faith in maybe somebody like a [Matthew] Breetzke to come in to the team.”
Pooran, who has played all seven games so far, has a highest score of 22 (in this game) from a total of 73 runs scored at a strike rate of 82.02. Markram and Badoni, as well as Marsh and Pant, haven’t been outstanding either, but have done much better than Pooran. Last season, Marsh had topped the 600-run mark, Pooran the 500-run mark, and Markram finished with close to 450 runs.
Langer, who has now overseen five losses in seven games, is staring at a season that has already turned fairly pear-shaped.
“Yeah, we haven’t quite clicked, have we,” Langer said at the press conference after the game. “Last year, our numbers were incredible and we were ruing the fact that a lot of our bowlers were injured or coming back from injury or not quite fit. This year our bowlers have been a real credit. Mohsin Khan, again, outstanding. Prince Yadav, I think they’re both players who will play for India. Super talents. Mayank [Yadav] came back today, which was really good. He’s been out for some time after his back surgery. He’s showing great courage to come back. He’ll be better for the run today. [Mohammed] Shami does what he does and he’s a very crafty bowler. I thought Digvesh Rathi bowled well today as well and I thought our fielding was excellent.
“But our batting’s just not quite clicking. Who would have thought at the start of the season, if – how many games have we played now, seven games – our batting hadn’t clicked with the calibre of players we’ve got, we could never have read that. So we’re working hard on it.”
Speaking specifically about moving the main batters around and having to plug the Pooran hole, Langer said, “We just felt that at the start of the season, we know they can do it. [But] because it worked last year, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work this year. That said, Aiden, you know, he’s a selfless sort of player, and we felt from the first few games, we needed that cricket smarts in the middle and we thought with Nicky and Aiden, two of our most experienced players, it’s often the hardest place to bat in T20 cricket. So that’s why we’ve adjusted that.
