South Africa's players want to play more matches in bilateral series in order to build a competitive edge and momentum as a national side, according to middle-order batter Heinrich Klaasen.
Asked how the team will approach the fourth and final T20 against India on Friday, given that they can no longer win the series, (and have not won a bilateral series in two years), Klaasen said they just wish they had more games.
"That's the nature of where we are as South African cricket. We don't play five-match series any more," he said after their 11-run defeat in Centurion. "How nice would it be if we win on Friday, and then we have another game on Sunday, going into it two-all?"
Of course, the opposite could also happen and South Africa could go 3-1 down which would make any potential fifth game a dead-rubber but Klaasen was not pressed on that. Instead, he was unhappy with how little South Africa play across formats. "Our Test team is playing two-Test series, which is ridiculous in my eyes. It's disappointing, and it doesn't sit well with the players, because we want to play more cricket against these guys, and against the other countries as well, but we always find a way to just play two games or three games, and it's annoying."
Though Klaasen retired from Tests in January this year, he still has strong feelings about the shorter formats, which South Africa play more regularly but not necessarily as much as they would like. South Africa have played a five-match T20I series only twice - in 2022 against India and in June 2021 in the West Indies. Just before that, they hosted Pakistan for a four-match T20I series. Apart from a 50-over series of five games at home against Australia before the 2023 World Cup, their ODI clashes have been limited to three matches since a Sri Lanka series in March 2019, which was preparation for that year's World Cup, and they have not played a three-match Test series since the 2022-23 summer in Australia. They are also not scheduled to play any three-match series until hosting England and Australia in 2026.
For comparison, since August last year, India have played three five-match T20I series (against West Indies, Australia and Zimbabwe) but have also only played three-match ODI series since early 2019. Their Test schedule is far busier than South Africa's with five-Test series against Australia and England in the next eight months. The Australia Tests start in a week's time and that squad is already preparing in Perth, while the T20I outfit competes in South Africa. "You see India are playing this Friday and next Friday, which is incredible, on two different sides of the world," Klaasen said.
India are not the only country who have split squads in operation. Recently, England's Test squad finished a series in Pakistan while their white-ball outfit was in the West Indies, which speaks of both their demand as an opposition and their depth. South Africa could do something similar because they do have some players who are red or white-ball only, such as Klaasen, but whether they could field full competitive squads in two formats at the same time remains to be seen. A case in point is what happened earlier this year when most of South Africa's first-choice Test players were unavailable for a tour to New Zealand because they were contractually bound to play in the SA20. South Africa lost 2-0, the first time they had ever lost a Test series to New Zealand. Still, they remain in contention for the World Test Championship final and can get there if they win all four home Tests this summer.
The planning for those is taking place now, with Kagiso Rabada rested from the India T20Is and Lungi Ngidi on a conditioning break. But Aiden Markram has continued to captain the side and will not get any red-ball domestic game time before those Tests. Markram is in a white-ball run-scoring rut and has not gone past 30 in his last 12 T20I innings. He was dismissed for 29 in Centurion, after hitting successive sixes off Varun Chakravarthy and then dragging him down to deep midwicket. Markram's reaction was to scream and punch his bat, which Klaasen understood all too well.
"If I put your career, as whatever job anyone does, on the table, and I said, 'if you make one mistake, and that's the end,' you will be frustrated if you make a mistake. Not that his career is at all on the line, by the way," he said. "I'm just saying, people need to understand that that's what we go through. It's in the heat of the moment. There's a billion people that are going to be on your head if you fail. There's a lot of frustration and he was looking fantastically in the way that he struck the ball tonight. It's nice to see that he's finding some rhythm in his game, and hopefully he will kick on."
He also hopes that for himself. Since leaving the MLC in July because of a family emergency, Klaasen has batted in eight T20s at domestic and international level combined, with one fifty. "It's been a lean run, but I've also had a small break so it's not that easy, in this format especially, just to come in and play aggressive cricket" he said. "For the style that I play, I just have to find some form. I know and understand my game at this moment, which is very nice, and I'm in a fortunate position to understand my game and know where I need to tweak. Also, I don't look into that too much, because like I said, it's been a long year, a tough year, and it was still a fantastic year for me."
In 2024 so far, Klaasen has played 55 T20 matches (across domestic and international) in four tournaments, the T20 World Cup and the ongoing bilateral series. He has a batting strike rate of 164.32, his highest for any calendar year.