Last Updated on 5 years by Charbel Coorey
The South African cricket team showed their disconnect with the governing body and the South African Cricketers’ Association calling out their leadership qualities. The national team of men’s and women’s players issued a joint statement through the South African Cricketers’ Association calling on CSA for their governorship. While talking to EspnCricinfo, Tabraiz Shamsi said that there is a big distinction between the Proteas team itself and CSA as a whole.
Lately, the SACA has come under the limelight for all the wrong reasons one of which is out and out racism. However, the left-arm chinaman assures that the mood has changed in the camp. “In the Proteas environment, I have never experienced any racism. Past players have spoken about things where stuff was not equal and even the players that did make it had to go through some sort of hurdles that they shouldn’t have experienced if there was a level playing field. That’s the biggest thing we need to acknowledge and understand and ensure that kind of stuff is taken away from the system, that kind of stuff won’t be tolerated and it’s not okay. But, as a whole, I’ve never experienced something like that from the players. Where we sit, we are stronger than we were before this camp, because we have had those chats, and I see it as a big positive. We’ve sat down and we’ve come up with the way forward. We are in a good space”, he said in the interaction.
“We know there’s a bit of turmoil in the administrative side of things and those are things that we cannot control. Those are things that are not for us to worry about because our job is to play cricket for the nation and win games and win trophies for the country”, he added.
The 30-year-old who has taken 49 wickets in just 46 matches until now emphasized that the team has now reached a place of greater understanding and contextualized each others’ background to develop a better communication among the teammates. “We realized there is a lot of strength in being able to communicate rather than assuming. Once we understand things from the other person’s perspective, things become a lot clearer and a lot easier to understand where people are coming from – where their hurt is coming from and where their happiness is coming from”, says Shamsi.
Through the South African team has not released any kind of statement disclosing their fixtures for the national team or international squad, Shamsi says the squad will be ready when the time comes to play.
