Some tough, brave decisions that we’ve seen so far from the newly appointed Proteas head coach, Mark Boucher, suggests he wants players to put more value into the privilege of representing South Africa, writes Ongama Gcwabe.

A month into his role as head coach of the Proteas, Mark Boucher has certainly made a statement to both the players and the fans with some of the decisions he has made.

Firstly, we saw Theunis de Bruyn being dropped from the Test team after quite a long run of inconsistency since making his Test debut.

The one thing I think most of us are forgetting about Theunis is that he left the Titans at the age of 25 and moved to the Free State to captain the Knights. In his debut season as a franchise team captain, he led the Knights to their first 4-Day Franchise Series triumph.

With his rise, we saw players like Duanne Olivier making their mark in the domestic scene and he too got the nod from the national selectors.

But numbers don’t lie, his drop is justified. Certainly, he will make his comeback in the Test side sooner than most think because he’s a quality batsman.

Secondly, Temba Bavuma was excluded in the starting eleven in the recently concluded New Year’s Test match and was released to play domestic cricket, also after managing only one century in a period of four years and only averaging 15 from the last five Test matches he played for South Africa.

This sent shock waves through the South African cricket public. A man who was selected as vice-captain of the Test team only a couple of months before Boucher was appointed head coach, was dropped for lack of runs, a lack of centuries behind his name.

For me, this is also justified purely from a numbers point of view internationally (39 Matches, 31.2 average, one century, 13 half-centuries).

But these decisions meant that guys who have been performing consistently in first-class cricket get a crack at Test cricket.

The likes of Rassie van der Dussen, Zubayr Hamza, Dwaine Pretorius and Pieter Malan got opportunities to represent the country at the highest level after many seasons of consistent performances for their franchises.

To me, this suggests that Boucher wants guys to put more value into representing the country, not just by words and intent, but with runs and wickets in the domestic scene.

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