South Africa Searching For Answers, Specialists, Hypnotists Perhaps?

The image is a blur indeed. South Africa are unable to fathom why a team that looks to climb to the top fails to win an ICC event.
While Cricket South Africa (CSA) have assured that Graeme Smith will continue to remain captain of the South African cricket team despite the hosts’ shocking exit out of the ICC Champions Trophy, they are baffled to explain how despite a change of team, personnel and strategies over the years post isolation have failed to yield a champion at the ICC tournaments.
While some explained that the “team was too good for the tournament” (go figure how that logic applies), there are even more bizarre statements as national selector Mike Procter now feels what South Africa needs is specialists, not all rounders! (the Indian captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, has stated that the lack of genuine all rounders did India in)
It is hard to imagine that this team of individual match winners failed to ignite when it mattered most. It is now a matter of such public hurt and sentiment that the CSA will launch a full scale inquiry on what is jinxing South Africa when it comes to the more important tournaments, especially with the 2011 World Cup that Mickey Arthur, the South African coach and Smith have been planning for the last couple of years. They were looking to the Champions Trophy to be their test on far they need to go before they can perfect the team but this defeat now, coming after their shock defeat in the semi final of the 2009 ICC World Twenty20 to Pakistan, will leave them with more question marks, ones that no one seems to have put their finger on.
Dale Steyn touched upon how hurt his South African teammates were and nothing would mean more, not even the ICC ODI and Test rankings, than winning on the ICC tournaments. Jean Paul Duminy also expressed the mindset and mood of the South African team that were devastated at how their story has unravelled in this tournament. Disappointment is perhaps not a big enough word for the South African captain.
Perhaps South Africa could then turn to the one man who believes he has turned Pakistan’s fortunes in the ICC World Twenty20. Maqbool Babri, the Pakistan based psychiatrist/hypnotist who worked with the Pakistan team prior to the tournament and offered to help Shah Rukh Khan’s Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), may be able to tell something about the South Africans because he believes Pakistan have lost fear of failure from their bones. Surely there is something more than just fear that has associated with South African cricket, change of captain or personnel or even time notwithstanding.

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