Amla not likely to make cut

Top player yet to crack nod in T20 series against Australia

YOU face the best bowlers in the game at their freshest and armed with the new ball. As a South African, you have a strike rate of 125.55 – better than Quinton de Kock and JP Duminy.

You scored a career-best 69 not out in your previous innings in the format. You should, surely, get a game.

Apparently not if you are the adored Hashim Amla, the owner of the stats above. He has yet to crack the nod in South Africa’s T20 series against Australia.

Might Amla feature in the decider at Newlands today?

If all things were equal, hell yes. But they are not.

“There is a bit of importance [in winning today],” De Kock said yesterday. “We want to win.

“We know series wins against Australia don’t come easily. But there’s a bigger picture.”

The Proteas play their first match in the World T20 against England in Mumbai next Friday. The conditions, the pressures and the expectations will be vastly different than a home series, even a home series against the respected Aussies.

Which is not to say Amla will not stand up to those challenges. But the delicate balance of South Africa’s team means anything that looks like experimentation – even if it is not – will look like confusion and the acknowledgement of weakness.

And it is a dangerously short step from there to the kind of mental meltdowns that have afflicted the Proteas in tournaments past.

So, having heeded the howls of protest about AB de Villiers batting too low in the order, South Africa are unlikely to move him from the top of the order.

Which means Amla and De Kock are fighting it out for the remaining opener’s birth.

Did that make the dressingroom wracked with tension between the two?

“Not really,” De Kock said. “Whoever is in that position will do the best thing that’s needed for the team to try and win a World Cup for once.

“There’s not much competition between him and I. There’s no beef, nothing like that.”

It helps that De Kock and Amla are among the least inward looking players in the game. There is not much ego to be bruised in either of them.

De Kock took a similarly even handed approach about which of the Proteas openers should be the aggressor.

“It doesn’t matter who takes it on,” he said. “If we both go at it, so be it. If one of us gets out early we just carry on.

“It changes. Even Hash can play very aggressively, as we saw the other day.

“I always have a look to see that the strike rate is at 100%, and when the time comes have a go.

“If it comes my way I’ll try and get the job done,” De Kock said.

But he was happy that Mitchell Johnson and Mitchell Starc were not among the Australians. “They’ve been the only two guys to hit me on the head, so I’m glad they’re not here.”

South Africa will want another look at Dale Steyn, who came back from almost 10 weeks out with injury at the Wanderers on Sunday, and they will hope for signs of form from Duminy.

For all that, today’s game is a sideshow to the main event, which started in India yesterday.

Would Australia travel 11 000km to play three T20s if a WT20 was not glittering on the horizon? No. Do they want to win today? Yes.

That is all the reason South Africa need to play properly.