All Proteas players to be given ‘game time’ during T20 ties against Black Caps

Johannesburg: South Africa’s T20 coach Russell Domingo has said that he plans to give ‘game time’ to all the players in his 15-man squad match during their three-match T20 series against New Zealand. “That’s the plan.

We have 15 players; Dale (Steyn) will play on Friday and probably miss the last two, and Morné (Morkel) will come in and play after that so everybody is going to get some sort of game time in the series.

That is important for me in widening our base and giving guys an opportunity to perform at this level,” Sport24 quoted Domingo, as saying.

According to the report, one of the challenges faced by Domingo and the coaching staff has been to galvanise a new-look T20 squad, and to instill the prevalent team ethos found in the settled Test environment within a short space of time.

“The Test culture that has developed over the last couple of years is something that we are striving to take through to the shorter formats, it’s not going to happen overnight,” Domingo explained.

However, Domingo insisted that that he and the Proteas squad are hopeful of overcoming the problem soon. “It will be a little bit of a process, but we are feeding it through in small drips at the moment.

Little bits of what is happening in the Test side we are trying to incorporate here (T20 squad), while still doing certain things differently because it’s a different group of players, there are different ways to manage the younger players,” he said.

“The longer we have together, the more information we will provide these younger guys as to how things run in the national side. The guys have been excited about it and are buying into how it works,” he added.