Pienaar to help the Proteas get back on top
Francois Pienaar believes he can make a meaningful contribution to the panel that will be tasked to assess the Proteas’ below-par performances.
|||Johannesburg - Former Springbok captain Francois Pienaar believes he can make a meaningful contribution to the panel that will be tasked to assess the Proteas’ below-par performances in recent months.
The 1995 World Cup-winning captain was named as a member of a four-man panel that will conduct the review of the national cricket sides after a dour 12-month spell on the international stage.
Headed by independent director and chairperson of the CSA HR Committee, Dawn Mokhobo the panel will also include former Proteas player Adam Bacher, and sports scientist Dr Ross Tucker.
”We’ve had a couple of calls, and we are designing the scope on April 28 which the goes to the board who will sign off and we will start our work,” Pienaar said at the Sanlam Cape Town Marathon launch yesterday.
“So now we will have meeting to see how big the scope is, where the key focus areas will be, and our roles.”Pienaar shrugged off questions about his credentials and how his knowledge of a different sporting code would contribute to the review.
”I have a passion for this country, I’ve played Nuffield cricket, I love the game, I was involved with the marketing of the IPL (Indian Premier League) when it came to South Africa,” he said.
”I think we know things about high performance and closing down of games, we got involved in a couple of initiatives where we put certain structures in place that have borne fruit.”Pienaar said he had been exposed to high-performance environments including Steve Waugh’s record-breaking Australian Test cricket team, and believed those experiences would aide him during the assessment of the Proteas.
”I think it is a privilege to be asked, I had a magnificent session with the Aussies before the Ashes in early 2000 and they asked me to do a session on margins and how do you close big games down,” Pienaar said.”I was sort of embarrassed that the best team in the world by a long shot asked me, and I found it very interesting.
My payment then was that I got insight into how they run their team and Steve Waugh as a captain and a leader, I’ve learned a lot from that.
”Pienaar said it was important to identify and implement the right processes that would ensure the national team were consistently at a high level.
”It is about getting processes in place.”AIMING HIGH: Councillor Garreth Bloor, City of Cape Town Mayoral Committee member Sanlam Cape Marathon ambassadors Francois Pienaar and Elana Meyer at yesterday’s launch of the September 18 race.
The Star