Ottis Gibson sticks by his belief that a ‘positive brand’ of cricket is the right approach, but slammed his batsmen’s execution of it. 

The Proteas coach did not shy away from slamming his side’s batting performance in their last three limited-overs matches.

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The obvious style throughout the T20I by the Proteas batsmen was to sweep, but they lost five wickets attempting the sweep shot in the match.

This attacking approach was talked up as the blueprint to the Proteas batting style moving forward. They failed to implement the approach in the last three limited-overs matches and Gibson blamed it on poor decision making and not the style.

‘[Positive cricket] is defined every time we talk. Yes, we want to be positive, but we still want to be making good decisions,’ Gibson added.

‘The team or the players that make the best decisions are the ones that perform the best. Like I said, the decision making of some of our players with regards to shot selection was questionable.

‘The ball was spinning – some guys play spin very well, some not so well, but I still like the fact that we trying to score runs. My feeling is that if we defend, and go out defending, then we still not scoring runs and still have to find a way to score.’

Spin was king throughout the series. The Proteas batsman clearly struggled at reading the variation of spin produced by the hosts and Gibson expressed his concerns.

‘It’s a concern when people go back into themselves. The same spinners bowled in the first three games that we won,’ Gibson insisted. ‘Akila [Dananjaya] got wickets but we took a lot of runs off him because we were positive in our decision making and we swept and scored.

‘What I don’t want is people to go back into themselves and try to defend, I still want people to look to score. In the first three games when we did that, he still got a few wickets, but we scored runs off him. The last couple of games when we tried to defend is a different story.’

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