Former South Africa Cricket captain, Faf Du Plessis says he is still dedicated to the Proteas course despite a terrible 2019 with the team.
According to Du Plessis, the 2019/2020 season was one of the most difficult seasons of his career.
“The season gone by is probably one of the toughest I had to face over my career because it had a lot of different elements to it that wasn’t just cricket” he said.
The ex-Proteas captain says he is ready for the new challenge ahead but admits he is still hurting from the team’s performance at the 2019 Cricket World Cup.
“I was up for the fight but the sheer amount of pressure that the India team put on us took us to a breaking point,” he acknowledged.
“It was obvious to me that as a Test team we weren’t near where we wanted to be.”
Du Plessis acknowledged that the Proteas were not moving forward under his leadership and feels his decision to vacate the position as captain after their Test Series defeat to England was right.
“The pressure really started pointing towards me and a lot of energy was pushed towards me, I just felt at the time that I had been fighting the good fight for the Proteas and I gave it my absolute everything,” Du Plessis said.
“After the Test series, I went away and that was when I thought it was the right time,” he added.
Du Plessis insists he is still committed to the Proteas.
“I have been a captain since the age of 13 and I’ve always looked at myself as a leader before a player,” he said.
“I enjoy that more than anything else so I will always miss it but I do think the time is right for me to move on to what will be a position of growing other leaders.
“This is something I have looked at as my real purpose in the next year for the Proteas to really get stuck in and grow guys and share my experience.”
Faf Du Plessis was test captain of the Proteas in December 2016, and assumed full-time captaincy in all formats of the game in August 2017.