By Jane Bramley
There are no plans to fire either Proteas captain Graeme Smith or coach Mickey Arthur after South Africa's premature exit from the ICC Champions Trophy, but Cricket South Africa (CSA) is seeking answers.
CSA chief executive Gerald Majola said on Monday that South Africa's loss to England in their final Champions Trophy group match in Centurion on Sunday was "deeply disappointing".
"There are some hard questions to be answered," said Majola. "At no stage did the team look anything like a team who are the World No.1 in both Tests and One-Day Internationals. They certainly were way off where they should be at this stage and I will be speaking to Mickey and the team management to find out what went wrong."
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'The team's performance in this tournament was just not good enough' But Majola said there were no plans at this stage to fire either the captain or the coach.
"That's not going to happen but we definitely want answers. The team's performance in this tournament was just not good enough. I don't want to pick out individuals but there were problems with the bowling and the batting and the team's body language was not that of the world's best team."
South Africa lost to Sri Lanka in the opening match of the tournament but bounced back to achieve a comfortable victory over New Zealand.
England - fresh from a 6-1 series loss at home to Australia - beat Sri Lanka in their opening match and then outplayed South Africa on Sunday to win by 22 runs.
Smith, who made a gallant career-best 141 in a losing cause on Sunday, was visibly disappointed after the match.
'We've got to look at ourselves and improve' "I don't want to make excuses," he said. "England played superbly and Owais Shah and Paul Collingwood set up a very good platform for them.
"We made some mistakes and in the end we just weren't good enough in our three games. We've got to look at ourselves and improve."
South Africa played all three group matches at Supersport Park, largely as a result of a dispute between CSA and the Gauteng Cricket Board at the time the venues were allocated, and Arthur acknowledged that he would have preferred to have played Sri Lanka at the Wanderers, where the pitch offered more for the pace bowlers.
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