Cricket South Africa may completely change the team structure after the side's dismal performance in the ongoing World Cup, says captain Faf du Plessis.
At Edgbaston on Wednesday, South Africa suffered a four-wicket defeat against New Zealand and now stands on the verge of elimination.
With most of the senior players - including captain Du Plessis himself - not available for the next World Cup four years later, the Proteas captain admits that the selectors might have to take a tough call regarding the future.
“I think that will happen naturally with quite a few guys at the end of their careers. So you’re probably getting three or four guys getting away from that. And then you will. You know, depending on cricket South Africa, I feel in terms of what they believe is a good way forward, they might want a complete change,” said du Plessis.
But he also admitted that “those are things you sit down and talk about.”
“For me, it’s just finding - we’ve got some young players, so there's a future there. The young guys, I've really backed them this tournament. I think they've got a great future ahead of them,” he said.
“What will naturally happen is you'll probably lose six or seven players after this tournament. Whether you want to change more than that, no, I don't think you need to do more than that.”
In the last three World Cups, South Africa have been mauled by New Zealand and after going down to the Kiwis at Edgbaston, Du Plessis revealed that it felt a bit like the evening at Auckland four years ago,when South Africa lost to the same team in the semifinal of the 2015 World Cup.
“Very disappointed. You know, it almost feels like fours years ago against New Zealand again, where we actually played a good game of cricket. I can't fault the game that we played today. We threw everything at New Zealand.
“We've been saying, and we've been hard on ourselves in that as well. We need guys to stand up and put in performances that will win you games. That has been where we've been short in the innings we've played so far,” he said.
Talking about what went wrong for the side, the skipper said: “The wicket wasn't as flat as you would have thought it would be. Those first 15 overs felt exactly like Auckland. The ball was hooping around corners there.
"So we felt like we did the whole work, and we thought it would be easy, but they kept getting a wicket every time there was a 50 partnership, 60 partnership, and you need that to go to 100, and you need one guy to bat through the innings.”
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