South Africans

The playing squad for next season is starting to have a finished look about it with only a few outstanding questions. The two most interesting of which have developed over the past few days. Brian Halford first mentioned Monde Zondeki's name on Thursday, but it was overshadowed somewhat by the news of Tony Frost coming out of retirement and none of the other sources reporting the Frost news picked up on it, this was after his counterpart, George Dobbell in the Post reported Warwickshire were in an advanced stage of negotiations with a fast bowler the day before.

Several places have reported that the signing of Zondeki is close, but again Brian Halford has gone a little further and suggested in Friday's Mail that he has already signed a summer contract. Given his scoop on the news in the first place I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt here and assume it is a done deal.

He does appear to be a promising talent and although he has not nailed down a permanent place in the South Africa set-up he has plenty of pace and should be able to cause county batsmen plenty of problems. He is on the verge of the South Africa test side, but last played for them over 2 years ago. It seems likely that he will only be available for the first half of the summer (pre Twenty20), before being called up by South Africa. But as my friend Tim tells me, this is likely to mean around 7 Championship games and 8 One Day games.

The other piece of news is the international retirement of Shaun Pollock. I'm sure, like many other people with an interest in Warwickshire, as soon as I heard the news I immediately thought of the chances of him coming back to play for the bears in the summer. In actual fact I was in a pub with my wife and saw the news on a TV and then spent quite a long time talking at her about the possibility of him playing for Warwickshire again, much to her delight.

He would be an excellent signing, if Giles can pull it off. Not least for his lower order batting, which would go some way to making up for the potential loss of Ambrose higher up the order, it certainly wouldn't balance the books, but having a test centurion coming in at number 6 or 7 would be a nice boost. It does however put Giles in an interesting moral dilemma. He reiterated as recently as Friday "We don't want to go down the Kolpak route." When talking about further signings (in addition to Zondeki), however with Pollock's international retirement he would be available as a Kolpak. Interestingly it appeared during the winter that Pollock was one of Giles' initial overseas targets, but his potential unavailability appears to have put him off. Ironically it might now be Pollock's retirement that gives Zondeki a chance in the test side and completely flips their relative availabilities on their head.

I would be surprised if Shaun Pollock wasn't appearing in County Cricket at some point next season, but whether it will be for Warwickshire or not, we'll have to wait and see.