Shukri Conrad‘s T20 World Cup starts now.
In his first white-ball competition as South Africa‘s head coach, Conrad is stepping right into the cauldron as South Africa take on India in the first of their three Super Eight games, and he can’t wait for what he called “the biggest match of the competition thus far”. Step one was getting to this point. Step two is enjoying it.
“The first half of the group stages was the anxious bit for me. This is now the excitement,” Conrad said in Ahmedabad. “Tournament cricket almost has three parts to it. You’ve got to find a way of just getting out of that group stage. So we did that. Now you look and you say, right, we’ve got India first up and then the West Indies with some of the most entertaining players in the world and that excites me.”
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South Africa will close out the Super Eight against their neighbours Zimbabwe, by which time their fate could already be decided so the next five days in Ahmedabad will be the most intense. A packed crowd is expected on Sunday, which will be more than double the biggest South Africa have had so far after close to 55,000 people went to watch their match against New Zealand at the same venue, and the match will be played on a black-soil pitch, a slower surface that could bring the spinners into play.
Combine those factors and it may mean South Africa are the team under the pump but Conrad casually passed some of the pressure back to their hosts. “Pressure is a big thing but it’s pressure both for us and them,” he said. “I think we all talk about the pressure of playing against the top side, but we’re not quite aware of what the pressures they are under. I’m not, for one, suggesting that a guy that has three ducks in his last three matches comes under pressure for his place in his side. No.”
The player Conrad is referring to is Abhishek Sharma, who has not scored a run and also missed India’s second match of the tournament through illness. He hasn’t scored any runs so far and has been dismissed by offspinners twice in three games but South Africa’s squad only has two left-arm spinners in the first-choice attack. That explains why both Aiden Markram, who bowls more-than-part-time offspin and Tristan Stubbs, whose offspin is part-time, spent significant amounts of time bowling in the nets on Friday.
Aiden Markram bowls during South Africa’s training session ICC/Getty Images
Either they’re expecting to put in a big shift, or it’s South Africa playing mind games against an Indian line-up in which at least four of the top six are left-handers. “The match-ups can be overstated. I’m not a big fan of it,” Conrad said. “Sometimes the wickets are so good that it takes the match-ups out of the equation. If there’s something in the wicket and there’s a little bit of spin, then the match-up could be there for the offspinner against the left-hander. Maybe the angle you create sometimes. By and large, I think it’s slightly overstated on really good batting wickets.”
And even though there have only been seven first-innings totals over 200 in a group stage of 40 matches, Conrad thinks the surfaces are “slightly better,” than they were when South Africa toured India late last year. So why haven’t bigger totals – and in particular the 300 that everyone was talking about pre-tournament – come? It’s that p-word again. “The pressure of the World Cup,” Conrad said. “Prior to the World Cup, people were talking of scoring 300 plusses and all sorts of things but generally with World Cups there is a lot more at stake. In bilaterals, guys come in and they play with a lot more gay abandon but World Cups bring a decidedly different type of pressure.”
For a team like India, who are also smothered by messages about repeating history and encouraged to keep the cup at every corner, that kind of pressure can take its toll and South Africa know that. “There’s so much scrutiny, especially a side like India. They’re going to be under a lot of pressure to make the semi-finals and obviously go on and make the finals as well,” Conrad said. “Hopefully we can expose them and make them vulnerable under that pressure.”
Shukri Conrad oversees South Africa training PA Photos/Getty Images
At the same time, Conrad understands how capable India are of giving it right back, with a bowling attack headlined by Jasprit Bumrah and Varun Chakravarthy and a line-up that is probably stronger than any South Africa have faced so far. “They love hitting sixes. They like putting you under pressure from the first ball so if we can strike a few early blows with the ball and similarly withstand an early onslaught with the bat, then that will go a long way to giving us the right result,” he said.
Ishan Kishan has hit the joint-most sixes at the tournament so far – 11 – while Ryan Rickelton comes in at eighth with eight, followed by Hardik Pandya with seven. Big hits are just one of the things South Africa are ready for, after experiencing it when they visited India late last year for an all-format tour. Though they lost the T20I series 3-1, Conrad used it as a recce and is ready to show what his side have learnt.
“That tour gave us a really good insight as to what we could be up against. That tour prepped us really well in terms of the hostility, the fervour that’s being built up around Sunday where we could have 130,000 people crammed into the stadium and they’re going to be in blue,” he said. “But Sunday is just one of the few matches that we have to win to get through, and we’re as well prepared as we can be.”