SMITH STEPS DOWN AS SOUTH AFRICA T20 CAPTAIN

Roman Pavlyuchenko spared Tottenham’s blushes and kept them in their Champions League tie against Young Boys with a late wonder striker in Switzerland. Spurs were found wanting early on in the match against last year’s Swiss Super League runners-up and found themselves 3-0 behind inside 28 minutes.
It looked as though all of last season’s hard work in achieving a fourth place finish might have been undone in a matter of half an hour’s football at the start of this season. Yet the irony of it all is that their odds of qualifying for the group stages – 1.27 on Betfair – are now only marginally bigger than they were before the game kicked off, despite a 3-2 defeat.
In cricket, Alastair Cook’s dreadful run of form with the bat has continued on the first morning of the third Test match against Pakistan this morning. Cook scored just six runs – four of which came from a thick outside edge which flew between the slips and gully – before he was dismissed, caught behind, from some regulation swing bowling by Mohammad Asif.
Graeme Smith has stepped down as captain of the South Africa Twenty20 side with immediate effect and will also step down as the ODI captain following next year’s World Cup on the subcontinent.
Smith has made the decision in an attempt to prolong his career at the top of the game. As captain of The Proteas in all forms of the game for the past six years Smith feels that the time is right for him to relinquish some of his responsibilities in order to allow him to continue performing to the best of his abilities.
Johan Botha and AB de Villiers are expected to top the list of candidates to replace Smith in the Twenty20 arena. The timing of Smith’s decision allows the incoming captain plenty of time to establish his own ideas ahead of the 2012 Twenty20 World Cup in Sri Lanka. A competition which Paddy Power make South Africa a 6/1 chance to win.