South Africa coach Rob Walter says the Proteas are ready for next month’s ICC T20 World Cup despite a lack of warm-up opportunities.
The series defeat to the West Indies featured just eight members of the World Cup squad, with more than half of the players fulfilling Indian Premier League commitments.
While Walter feels a proper build-up to a major tournament would have been ideal, he still feels the team is ready to compete.
“As a head coach, the ideal is to have your players together. You have a nice lead-in, you do things the way you want to do them, and you get yourself ready for a World Cup,” Walter told reporters.
“But that’s not our reality, and I’m comfortable with that. I’m comfortable with the players and the maturity they have.”
“I certainly would have liked to have had the players together for a bit more time, but we aren’t able to do that, so we just get ready.”
South Africa is one of just four sides that will not be playing an official warm-up match to get accustomed to local conditions. Walter added that inter-squad games will take place instead.
“We also had another [potential warm-up] match, which was shifted and changed, and then it fell away, but that was out of our control,” Walter said.
“We would have loved to have one warm-up game … but I’m not too unhappy because we’ve used these types of scenario-based inter-squad training sessions to good effect in the past. It allows us to shape things the way we want to.”
The Proteas begin their World Cup campaign against Sri Lanka in New York on Monday.
Pictured above: Rob Walter.
Image source: @sports_himanshu
