SA vs Pak: Piet Botha backs South Africa’s bowlers to attack but also wants them to be patient

But Botha warned they must also be more careful with their disciplines, which went wrong on Sunday afternoon and were magnified by the number of no-balls. In total, South Africa have bowled 23 in this match and ten of them in the second innings. Only one, a Kagiso Rabada ball that hit Masood on the knee, looked like a wicket-taking ball, but South Africa don’t want to risk there being more, and the player has gone too far.

“It’s disappointing,” Botha said. “It’s something that creeps into the game from time to time. We probably started a little bit with that problem in Bangladesh and fixed it. Now it’s come back again.”

But Botha is only partially right. In two Tests in Bangladesh, South Africa bowled 25 no-balls but then managed 28 against Sri Lanka and ten at SuperSport Park. Including this Test, that equates to 86 no-balls in six matches. Of those, Rabada had released 44 and Wiaan Mulder 11. Botha had an explanation for at least one of them. “With Wiaan, what we’re really trying to do is get him to run a little bit harder because he wants to be a pitcher that has a closing fourth on offense and is a little bit quicker,” he said. “One of the things we worked on was getting him to run a little harder and that brought its own problems. We worked on it a little bit this morning and it seemed to work for a while. For others it may be different on different days.”

A variety of other reasons were put forward to explain the rest. “Sometimes it’s the ground, sometimes it’s the wind, sometimes it’s fatigue, sometimes it’s the slope,” Botha said. “But obviously it’s something we have to pay attention to again and make sure we fix it.”

“Once you get frustrated or start looking too hard like we would have done in the second innings, you go four and five (runs and overs). That’s what you don’t want to do.”

Piet Botha, South Africa Test bowling coach

And that will be your second message to the attack of the morning: be patient. “We have a couple of very good tests where we have knocked teams out, but we always talk about these things: discipline and patience,” Botha said. “Once you get frustrated or start looking too hard like we would have done in the second innings, you go four and five (runs and over). That’s what you don’t want to do. Let’s go back to ‘Try to see if we can go three and over.’ three and there will be a false throw.”

In this case, they understand that by imposing the follow-on, they gave Pakistan some of the best batting conditions of the match, but after bowling them out for 194 and with a lead of 421 runs, they felt there was enough cushion to put them back in. . The surface has not yet shown any real signs of deterioration, but it is taking a turn and historically tends to become more difficult from the fourth day onwards. “There were a couple of slow motion videos with the dust and days four and five are expected to be the days when the spinner comes into play. A couple have already spun and bounced as well,” Botha said. “There are signs that tomorrow, after lunch, Kesh[av] Maharaj will get more and more into the game.”

Maharaj has already found the turn that Salman Agha, Pakistan’s part-time player, didn’t, but even if he doesn’t, South Africa is willing to bide its time. “We talk about it all the time because it’s what’s expected these days. That’s Test cricket,” Botha said.