South African coach Ottis Gibson has restated that the Proteas needs to continue with the 4 seamers combinations in order to play attacking cricket. He is a fast -bowling minded coach, Gibson acknowledged that his side will continue to chalk out plans on how to go about with a four-pronged pace attack.

As quoted in Cricinfo, Gibson said, “I’m a very fast-bowling minded coach and I guess we will always have to find a balance to see if we can get four fast bowlers in the team, first of all. We’ll look at things like are the conditions suited to four fast bowlers. If not we try and shape the team in other ways. Ultimately, especially in this series and for the rest of the summer, we will be looking to see how best we can fit four fast bowlers into whatever formula we come up with.”

Speaking about the contest against India, Ottis said, “If you want to beat the best team in the world, which India is, then maybe we have to do something slightly different to what we’ve done in the past. We have to get stuck in and be tough with the bat and the ball; get in their faces a bit and use our physicality in terms of our pace. We had, in this game, three guys bowling over 140 [kph] so we need to use that and have a presence that says we are trying to get to where you are as a team.”

However, the South African cricket sill worried about the back-to-back injuries of the fast bowlers. When asked how he will manage the workload, Gibson stated, “Last week we had a discussion with the medical panel about trying to set up a group of people to look after fast bowlers better. I think that fast bowlers are the bedrock of a really good cricket system and if we want to be No.1 in the world, especially in our conditions, fast bowlers are very important to that process. We need to find ways of looking after, monitoring, training our fast bowlers better because there have been a lot of injuries even before I got here.”