General manager will ensure Cricket SA make best use of resources, writes Luke Alfred

Before Christmas, Corrie van Zyl was appointed Cricket South Africa's (CSA) general manager for cricket. The announcement flew so low that it barely registered as a blip on the media's radar. This was, one felt, rather as the former national coach would have liked it. Never entirely comfortable in the media glare, Van Zyl operates best in that area of quiet just to the edge of the spotlight. He does his best work there.

Van Zyl's new job is complicated but to refine it to its essence means he is concerned, above all else, with the cricket pipeline.

How does schools cricket fit into amateur cricket, for example, and how does amateur cricket flow into the semi-professional and professional programme. His brief, in other words, is to see to it that Cricket SA make the best use of their resources, widening the base while ensuring the national teams remain competitive.

"I've always wanted to be on the administrative side," he says, ''so in a sense this [job] is perfect. Maybe I needed to go through the other roles to do this job properly."

Lurking beneath all of this are the wounds caused by the Proteas' World Cup quarterfinal loss to New Zealand in Bangladesh last year. Van Zyl says the disappointment has been deep and corrosive. He has taken months to recover, which is not to say he's a bad loser, but rather because he knows his team bottled in an otherwise imminently winnable game.

He has learned from defeat, though, and keeps circling back to the idea that cricket needs to entrench a culture of independence and self-sufficiency.

Cricketers, of whatever age, need to think independently and intelligently about what they are doing. They need to be mentally tough to boot - only then will the culture begin to produce the rounded players it needs to win World Cups.

"In the past, we had too much telling from coaches," he says. "That's where a change in coaching philosophy is important. The coach must reach the stage where he almost coaches himself out of a job because he's no longer needed."

The inference, of course, is clear. Van Zyl doesn't say it in so many words but he intimates that the Proteas weren't savvy enough that doomed night in Dhaka. How does one teach street smarts in a culture that doesn't particularly prize the cerebral? It's a puzzle.

In the meantime, Van Zyl is doing what he can to make the system better and more streamlined. He is proud, he says, of instituting a national athlete-management system, which will keep track of cricketers and monitor their rate of development and injuries.

Eventually, he hopes, such a system will provide the bedrock for a nationwide cricket audit, but that's some way down the line.

He's also hoping Cricket SA and the High Performance Centre at Tukkies are able to get a state-of-the-art indoor facility up and running on the campus.

There will be an adjacent office complex and, Van Zyl hopes, all national teams will train there before tours and tournaments. Most of all, Van Zyl wants South African cricket to be better than it already is. He will go about striving for this with his customary work ethic and dignity, values that will hold him in good stead in the months and years to follow.