Ruthless South African selection

My gut feel is that South Africa are being overly ruthless in dropping McKenzie and Morkel following their loss in the first two Tests against Australia. Morkel is young and looked really talented when the Saffers were over here last year. But in particular I'm not sure I like the tactic of using Prince as a makeshift opener alongside a debutant in Khan. Yes, McKenzie did a great job of converting from the middle order to open the batting, but that doesn't mean that everybody can.

McKenzie averages 24.2 in the series away to Australia that South Africa won. The reason that I feel a little sorry for him is that in a series that lasts only 3 games you only get 6 innings and one hundred in that time wouldn't be a bad success rate. In the 2nd Test, McKenzie was going well on 59 not out when South Africa won the game, depriving him of the chance to complete what might have been his big innings of the tour.

In the return series in South Africa McKenzie averaged 25.5 in the first two Tests which doesn't make him the worst South Africa batsman, with Amla narrowly less than that. But if England dropped players after such a brief run of poor form then Bell, for example, would have been discarded after the 2005 Ashes. The South African selectors seem to have felt that they were rightfully the best country in the world and, riled at not making this a reality, have reacted like a school kid would when they didn't get their own way. Courtney Walsh used to say that the West Indies loved touring England because if they won the first couple of matches they found themselves playing the England 2nd XI by the end of the series and I fear the South African selection has a whiff of that. Presumably Morkel will pretty rapidly come back into the squad, but McKenzie will struggle given his age - doubly so as Graeme Smith has openly talked about that and said it will be tough for him.

So when Smith is fit again, it will be interesting to see who gets the other opening slot - it's only a minor selection point but two left-handers is not preferable to a right and left combination. If one or both of the new openers do well then it will be seen as a great decision, but it's high risk and knee jerk - those sort of decisions rarely come off. If they wanted to boost the batting, I would have considered using AB de Villiers as keeper and dropping Boucher. Considered it....and then rejected it, realising that just because South Africa lost it doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't their best team playing.

One last point of note in the South African situation is that Prince comes back into the side as captain. I wonder how many times that has happened? Somehow I doubt we'll see the same from England if Strauss gets injured, no matter how much people like me might want to see Vaughan's captaincy skills at work again.