Replacing Walter won't be simple, but somebody has do do it

CSA timed the Rob Walter announcement perfectly. South Africa men's white-ball teams were last in action in the first week of March. They won't play again until midway through July. By then, South Africa will be WTC champions or runners-up and have played two Tests against Zimbabwe in Bulawayo.

Tuesday afternoon was a good time to announce that your white-ball coach had resigned. For good measure, Walter would likely have been sound asleep in New Zealand, where he lives, when the news broke.

He quit for personal reasons, CSA said in a release. The quotes attributed to Walter shed no light on what those reasons might be, but it isn't difficult to understand that leaving your family for weeks at a time to make a journey of more than 11,000 kilometres for a home series isn't ideal. Walter would have known that when he took up the job on a four-year-contract in March 2023. But he is allowed to change his mind.

Now what? Calls for Shukri Conrad, the red-ball coach, to be handed the reins in all formats are mounting. They come largely from brown Capetonians. Conrad is also a brown Capetonian. In South Africa's hopelessly, transparently and simplistically colour-coded society, that looks like an open and shut case of identity politics.

But there's more to this than that. Conrad has taken a team of limited resources and playing opportunities all the way to the WTC final. Should South Africa beat Australia at Lord's in June, Conrad will be the first coach to preside over a successful ICC trophy campaign since Gary Kirsten's team won the Test mace in August 2012. Conrad is a vastly experienced, canny coach who is blessed with a warmly human manner. Is he canny enough not to want to take on Walter's position?

Walter guided South Africa to the 2024 T20 World Cup final - the only time they have gone that deep in any men's World Cup - and to the semifinals of the 2023 ODI World Cup and of this year's Champions Trophy. But he was criticised for his teams' performance in bilateral matches - they won 33 of 67 across the formats, or 49.25% - by people who did not or would not accept his repeated explanation for their lack of success.

Because of his first-choice players' busy franchise schedule, Walter couldn't pick his strongest squad or field his strongest XI outside of ICC events. Whoever takes over from him will have to put up with the same reality.

Conrad knows what that feels like, having had to take a depleted squad to New Zealand in February 2024 because most of the players he would have picked were contractually bound to turn out in that year's concurrent SA20. New Zealand won both matches handsomely.

Aside from that example, and unlike Walter's situation, the only bona fide star Conrad has been unable to select because of T20 commitments is Anrich Nortje - who has opted out of the other formats.

Any coach is only as good as the players at their disposal, which in South Africa means a complex juggling act. Walter blooded 14 ODI and 13 T20I players during his tenure of just more than two years. That sounds positive, but it means established figures who might have featured sat out.

Tabraiz Shamsi, who took 11 wickets at the T20 World Cup - as many as Keshav Maharaj despite bowling 67 fewer deliveries - hasn't played in any of South Africa's dozen T20Is since the tournament. Ottneil Baartman, whose economy rate of 4.94 was South Africa's best at the T20 World Cup, has appeared in the format only twice since then.

Asked why Baartman wasn't picked for any of the four home T20Is against India in November, Walter told reporters at the time: "It's because we want to give exposure to Lutho Sipamla and Nqaba Peter. It's a balancing act. Everyone has to play their part to help the team transform and make it more representative."

Sipamla and Peter are black. Shamsi and Baartman are brown, which makes them second-class citizens in CSA's transformation equation. At least Baartman cracked the nod for the squad in the India series. Shamsi didn't get that far.

Walter's comment startled some, but we should be grateful for his directness on a subject that is too often tiptoed around. In April he said: "The system really needs to up the ante so that in six months, 12 months or two years time - and in particular when we reach the 2027 World Cup at home - the demographics and the representation in our team looks a bit different.

"So outside of the World Cup we'll continue to use our bilateral series to do exactly that, to grow our base of players and create international opportunities for players to pit their skills at a higher level, and just make sure we are delivering on a process that's going to change what our team looks like as we move forward."

Translation: it's CSA's job to make sure there are enough black and brown players to pick in the national teams. It's not the job of the coaches who pick those teams. So far, CSA haven't brought their side of the bargain well enough.

In attempting to correct the imbalances created by South Africa's brutally racist history, they have decreed that brown players are behind their black counterparts in the transformation queue - a semi-reversal of apartheid's society-wide pecking order, which put whites on top. It's partial because XIs can include up to five white players. So sides routinely have more white than black or brown players.

Hence even though the Warriors met the minimum requirement of fielding six players of colour in their XI for a list A match against the Dolphins at Kingsmead on February 16, they were dealt with heavy-handedly because only two of those players - and not the stipulated minimum in domestic matches of three - were black.

They did not have the required permission to deviate from the quota, which CSA would prefer us to call a target. How it is not a quota considering the Warriors were fined USD 27,300 half of it suspended for five years, and docked the five points they earned for daring to win that game by 126 runs, is difficult to fathom.

The Warriors would have been in no trouble had more than three of their six players of colour been black. Indeed, they would have been praised for going beyond what was expected of them. Even though that would have meant they had fewer brown players. Because there is no required minimum number of brown players, a damning indictment of the system.

Why should this matter to CSA in their deliberations over who might replace Walter? Because the Warriors coach who made the decision, for cricketing reasons, to pick a brown player when he should, to satisfy CSA's rules, have selected a black player was Robin Peterson.

On February 8, Peterson coached Mumbai Indians Cape Town to victory by 76 runs over Sunrisers Eastern Cape in the SA20 final at the Wanderers.

In other circumstances that would be a recommendation in favour of someone who is in the running for the South Africa position, as Peterson surely is. In these circumstances, maybe not.