Accepting that he would love to see AB de Villiers donning the whites again, South Africa Test captain Faf du Plessis has urged his teammates to move on from the batsman’s absence.
With batting collapses being the prominent feature of Proteas 3-1 series loss to England, the calls for de Villiers’ return has started doing the rounds again.
Faf du Plessis & Co. managed to cross the 300-run mark just three times in eight innings during the series and used three different batsmen in the No. 4 position from which de Villiers has been absent for more than a year. Their miserable series ended on Monday (August 7) when they were all out for 202 while chasing 380.
“I would love AB to play – we all know how good he is and we missed him, but we’ve spent too much time talking about when he is going to come back. The hope of him coming back is something we need to move the past, we need to find someone else to fulfil that role. If AB comes back it’s a huge bonus but I don’t expect him to come back into the Test team,” du Plessis said at the post-match conference.
De Villiers has not played a Test since January 2016, with injury sidelining the 33-year-old for much of last year, missing series against New Zealand, Australia and Sri Lanka. Later, he stated that he would be taking a sabbatical from the Test game with an eye on the 2019 World Cup. But at the same time, he is yet to take a final call on his Test career.
With de Villiers’ chances of returning to the Test team not clear at the moment, South Africa tried JP Duminy, Quinton de Kock and Temba Bavuma at number four. Duminy had to be dropped after the first Test while de Kock failed to adapt his game and so it looks like the Proteas would stick with Bavuma for a while now.
“We didn’t come here planning for JP to be dropped, we were hoping that he could bowl and play those x-factor innings,” du Plessis said. “The change with Quinton going in at four was to transfer pressure back on the England team and he is the one guy who can do that. He did that in the second Test with match-changing innings on a green-top but from a consistency point of view your number four needs to play the way the team needs him to play and Quinton plays the way Quinton need to play. In conditions like this, with the ball moving around, I think it’s better for Quinton to come in at six or seven like your Bairstow, Stokes and Ali.
“Temba is probably technically our best player along with Hashim and myself. I love what I see in Temba’s character and he’s going to be an important leader for us in the team. I’m a big believer that, if you see that in somebody you give them the responsibility to bring the best out in them. When he batted at four he was our best player in really challenging conditions and that showed me that he has the capability of being South Africa’s number four for a long time,” he added.
Du Plessis further admitted that batting failures cost his team the series. This was South Africa’s first series loss in England since 1998 and the captain hoped the team would pick up valuable lessons from the defeat.
“From a batting perspective we haven’t been where we needed to be, myself included, and England has a really quality bowling attack so we knew the series was going to be won and lost there,” he said. “The learning for the batting unit will be important – we know there are holes we need to fix. Heino [Kuhn] didn’t do as well as he would have liked, he’s a quality player so we’ll have to look at that and, from a balance point of view, six or seven batsmen is always the question for us.”