What has gone wrong with Natal cricket?

Two seasons after claiming the double, Natal have performed abjectly in the SuperSport Series, winning just one of their eight matches and losing five, and even with four top players away with the national squad for most of the season, to finish second last on the log is clearly unacceptable to the majority of supporters.

Senior players blame a highly disruptive 1998/99 season in which they had three different coaches guiding them and a largely inexperienced side as hardened replacements for the likes of Lance Klusener, Shaun Pollock, Dale Benkenstein and Jonty Rhodes were impossible to find.

Without criticising the coaches in question - Frans Cronje, Graham Ford and Ian Tayfield - a Natal player explained to The Witness that each of them had different backgrounds and therefore different ideas.

``There's been a lot of disruptions, especially with having three coaches, who each tended to want us to play a different way, plus we had two captains (Benkenstein and Errol Stewart).''

Hopefully, both these problems will have been addressed by next season, with Tayfield finding out in the winter whether he will take charge of the Natal team on a permanent basis, and Stewart, a thoughtful, experienced leader, likely to be named captain from the start of the 1999/2000 campaign.

The amazing comings and goings at the top were unfortunate and practically unavoidable. Cronje was transferred into a more administrative role in December, with Ford giving up his Director of Playing Affairs portfolio to try and rekindle the spark the team had during his first, highly successful tenure as coach.

But Ford was then offered the assistant coach's post on the national team's tour of New Zealand, with a trip to the World Cup and Bob Woolmer's job in the pipeline - the sort of offer one would be a fool to refuse - and he departed overseas at the beginning of February.

Tayfield, a player in the 1970s and a long-serving selector who had been active in the running of the Natal B team, was then rushed off to the senior side as caretaker coach.

Having already nabbed the Natal team's crown jewels - Pollock, Rhodes and Klusener - the national selectors began eyeing captain Benkenstein early on.

He was sent to Kuala Lumpur and Bangladesh for limited-overs tournaments, but no sooner was he back leading the Natal side than he broke his finger. He played a couple of provincial games upon his recovery, but since then he has disappeared as well, his international career, happily, having taken off.

Tayfield, who took over for the last three SuperSport Series games, agrees that inexperience also played a major role in the side's troubles. ``There's a lot of talent, but the players still need to learn what four-day cricket is all about. I've been trying to show them that it's about pressure. and patience. The bowlers need to bowl in the right places and wait for the batsmen to make the mistakes. But on a number of occasions our bowlers couldn't maintain the pressure at critical times - there were too many deliveries that the batsmen were able to score off very easily.''

The team's batting was at times fragile, but this was understandable with all the experience at the top (Watson, Bruyns, Stewart, and Hudson) and the middle-order made up of youngsters just finding their feet at provincial level, plus the batsmen were often shoved into the deep end by the profligacy of the bowlers.

Various positives have arisen from the turmoil however.

Trainer Andrew Shedlock believes the side has great potential. ``The effort has certainly been there, they've all worked very hard, and I think the fact they recently beat both Border and Northerns, the day/night league's top two sides, shows their potential. Jon Kent, Wade Wingfield and Grant Rowley have basically been replacing Klusener, Pollock and Benkenstein, and for them to have done as well as they have is really something.''

The amiable Tayfield also had encouraging words about the youngsters. ``There are a lot of positives, with the youngsters, especially Wingfield and Kent, coming through very nicely. They're all very, very keen, and all they need now is to learn how to win. With Mark Bruyns batting so well again and Keith Storey having really arrived as a most reliable seamer, all we need now is an injection in the bowling department and things will be looking good for next season.''

The Natal Cricket Union will also have to ensure off-field problems, mostly of a political nature, do not distract the players from their work out in the middle. A Natal regular told The Witness that the behind-the-scenes boardroom battles had a ripple effect on the players. ``It's very frustrating because we don't know what's going to happen next.''

The Natal camp is hoping they can follow the example of Western Province, who got their house in order after also finishing second bottom in last season's SuperSport Series. They went on to top the day/night league, have comfortably qualified for this season's Standard Bank Cup and will play in the showpiece SuperSport Series final this weekend.

Final Supersport Series log

                   P W L D Bat Bowl Pts
Border             8 5 1 2  17  32  99
Western Province   8 5 1 2  18  26  94
Northerns          8 5 2 1  12  29  91
Eastern Province   8 4 4 0  23  27  90
Gauteng            8 4 1 3  26  23  89
Free State         8 3 4 1  20  20  70
Griqualand West    8 1 3 4  15  24  49
Natal              8 1 5 2  15  23  48
Boland             8 0 7 1   8  19  27