The men’s T20 World Cup final in Barbados in June marked the start of journeys in opposite directions for the teams involved. Including that match, South Africa have lost five of their last six games in the format. India have won 10 of their last dozen T20Is and tied another.
Considering the gutsy cricket the South Africans played to reach their first final in a senior men’s World Cup, why have they struggled from there?
“I don’t know what to put it down to,” Reeza Hendricks told a press conference on Wednesday. “But we haven’t had most of the players who played in that game. We gave opportunities to new players in the last couple of series. We didn’t get the results we wanted, but there were a lot of learnings. Coming against India now is another opportunity. Hopefully we can correct that and get the results we’re after.”
Hendricks spoke from Kingsmead, where South Africa and India will meet on Friday in the first of four T20Is. He has a point about the personnel changes. Or maybe half a point.
Of the XI South Africa fielded in the final, only Hendricks, Aiden Markram and Tristan Stubbs played in the series against West Indies in Trinidad in August or against Ireland in Abu Dhabi in September. The South Africans’ sole success in those matches was an eight-wicket win over the Irish. They played all of them without World Cup finalists Quinton de Kock, Heinrich Klaasen, David Miller, Marco Jansen, Keshav Maharaj, Kagiso Rabada, Anrich Nortje and Tabraiz Shamsi.
But Hendricks’s argument is less convincing when we consider India’s post-World Cup T20Is. Of their XI in the final, just three played in a series in Zimbabwe in July. Seven were involved in a rubber in Sri Lanka in the same month, but only three featured in a home series against Bangladesh in October. And yet their only loss was to Zimbabwe by 13 runs.
Significantly, perhaps, six of India’s XI in Barbados have since appeared in T20Is. That’s double the number of South Africans. Seven members of each squad in the series starting on Friday were in the World Cup final.
Four of the South Africans who helped the Test team earn a 2-0 win in Bangladesh last month are in the T20I squad, but any expectation of the visitors arriving under the cloud of New Zealand completing a 3-0 Test whitewash at the Wankhede on Sunday are unfounded.
None of the Indians who played in that Test series will be at Kingsmead on Friday, not least because all but one of them are in the squad for the five-Test series in Australia starting on November 22.
How can India afford to spread themselves so thinly? There’s a clue in a comparison of South Africa’s and India’s domestic competitions. In the 2023/24 Ranji Trophy, 623 players appeared for 32 teams. In CSA’s 2023/24 first-class tournament, 15 teams fielded 268 players. So India have more than double the number of active first-class players than South Africa.
That’s hardly surprising considering South Africa’s total population amounts to only 4.42% of India’s. Put differently, there are 22.65 as many people in India than in South Africa. In GDP terms, India’s economy is 9.8 times the size of South Africa’s.
The differences are stark and vast, and they tell us what real depth in everything, including cricket, looks like.

By IPL Agent

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