Cape Town
Dale Steyn is likely to call time on his international career after this year’s T20 World Cup but remains committed to making himself available for South Africa in white-ball cricket until then.
Steyn, who retired from Tests in August last year and has not played for the national team in 11 months, will make his return with the upcoming T20I series against England, where he hopes to stake a claim for the T20 World Cup.
Asked if he would consider prolonging his limited-overs’ run until the 2021 edition of the competition, Steyn was hesitant, once he realised the competitions run in successive years.
“Is there another T20 World Cup? Next year? Wow, that’s short-lived. So if we win it, we only win for a year,” Steyn said in East London. “This one would be a nice one to go to and then finish off and reassess after the end of this year and then I will kind of figure out what I want to do.”
For now, the only thing Steyn wants to do is get on the park after missing out on South Africa’s last T20I series, against India last September when the selectors deemed him unfit despite his own declaration of readiness. “I love playing cricket. I wake up every day and I can’t see myself doing anything else right now. I am just putting my hand up and saying I’m available, pick me, don’t pick me and then we’ll see how it goes to the World Cup.
“As long as that drive is there to still play at the highest level, and get batters out and fox them and outsmart them and all that kind of stuff, if I can do that, I am going to continue to do that. And then once I can’t do that anymore, well once I decide that I don’t want to do it anymore, then I’ll be done.”
Recent evidence, in the Mzansi Super League and the Big Bash League, suggests that Steyn still has what it takes to get the better of some of the world’s best batsmen. He was the third-highest wicket-taker in the MSL where he counted AB de Villiers, Dean Elgar and Alex Hales among his 15 victims and took five wickets at 16.20 in the BBL. Notably, Steyn did not get all his wickets with pace alone and was playing with cutters and slower balls, especially in the MSL.
“I decided to play a braver brand of cricket,” Steyn said. “I tried one or two different things that I wouldn’t necessarily do and I thought I would use that as a nice time to experiment and it worked out quite nicely. With Test cricket, it’s very important that you are bowling at high speed but T20 cricket is a great way to be versatile. If you want to bowl 145kph, guys need to know that it’s there, a 90-plus-miles-an-hour bouncer, yorker, whatever it is but you can also change it up and then it makes that 90-mile-an-hour bouncer so much more effective. If you are just constantly doing the same thing, good batters can adjust.”—AP
