Cardiff: After a sound thrashing at the hands of hosts England in the recently concluded ODI series, South African coach Mickey Arthur is contemplating a few changes to the squad.

The Proteas conceeded the five match series 4-0 with inclement weather during the last tie here on Wednesday sparing them further humiliation.

Arthur conceded it may be the time for a change of direction for the one-day squad.

''We were missing some key personnel and we are trying to identify a brand of cricket to play in one day cricket and then identify players to pick to play that kind of brand,'' he said. ''I'm going to take a couple of weeks to go away and reflect and then come to those selection decisions.'' ''We've got five one-dayers at the end of October, early November against Kenya and Bangladesh which will give us a good base to start from with a young new side,'' he added. ''We'll look at the squad composition closer to the time.

'' Lamenting the decline of the national squad in recent years Arthur said,''In the past we have been lucky to have a lot of multi-skilled players which has made it seem that we had 12 or even 13 players on the field at the same time. This is what England had in the recent series with Andrew Flintoff giving them two players in one.

''We will now have to decide whether we can continue to follow the multi-skilled route or whether we need to go for pure specialists.'' South Africa's lacklustre performance took some of the gloss off their victory in the Test series, their first in England since 1965.

Arthur admitted he had put too much emphasis on winning the Tests, although he denied the one-day series had deflated his squad.

''We compartmentalised the two series which were played by slightly different sides,'' he said. ''We had goals and objectives set for our Test team which I think we conquered.

The one-day series we always knew was going to be a bit of a struggle.

''We're disappointed about the one day series but very excited about what we achieved in the Tests. The one thing I would criticise myself about on this tour was putting too much emphasis on winning the Test series. When we won it we felt 0we had achieved our goal.''


UNI

Tags: mickey arthur, south africa, england.