South Africa's coach gives his two cents on India's ODI series victory in Lanka, England's resurgence and more

It was a great relief to see India bounce back from a surprising Test series defeat to win the one-day series against Sri Lanka – not just because they deserved some success but because the one-day team has been rebuilt over the last year or so and I'm encouraged to see them enjoying the fruits of their labour.

It takes hard and brave decisions to change the face of a team, especially when there are established names and reputations involved. Sometimes the job is made a little easier with the retirements of senior players but, either way; all teams are destined to go through a transitional phase during which results can be unreliable and unpredictable.

India appear to be about a year ahead of South Africa in this regard and we now have the job of restructuring our one-day team in the post-Shaun Pollock era. It is often said that great players are never fully appreciated until they are gone. Well, that's probably not true in Shaun's case because everybody knew how brilliant he was – but our challenge is now trying to replace him.

Charl Langeveldt's retirement has also removed another 10 overs of experience from our attack leaving us very short of control at both ends of the innings. It will take time to replace them with bowlers able to adapt to the demands of international cricket so South African cricket fans will have to accept a few adverse results in the year ahead.

But India have shown the way forward by having very different squads for Test and ODI cricket and they now seem to have laid an excellent base to build towards the 2011 World Cup. Hopefully, for their sake, they will have established a winning culture by the time India have to start rebuilding the Test team, presumably after the Australia series towards the end of the year.

England, on the other hand, appear to have stumbled, almost accidentally, on the strongest looking one-day XI they have fielded for a decade or more and I will be keeping a very close eye on how they perform in the seven match series against India in December.

James Anderson can undoubtedly improve with the new ball but they are wicket-taking bowlers – especially in English conditions – while Andrew Flintoff and Steve Harmison can be hard to score against in the middle overs of the innings. Conditions will, of course, be very different in India than we have experienced in England this summer where it has rained almost every day for over two months.

I believe our tour will be remembered in years to come for the Test series which was a fantastic advertisement for the greatest form of the game. I enjoy all forms of the game but there is no doubt about which one the players regard as the truest and most severe examination of skill, technique and temperament. The proliferation of Twenty20 cricket will provide hours of instant entertainment and will spread the game's popularity, but it will also, in my opinion, enhance the status of Test cricket.

Finally, I would like to dispel the myth that the South African players didn't 'want' to go to Pakistan for the ICC Champions Trophy or that they in any way influenced the decision to withdraw. It was taken by the president and chief executive of Cricket South Africa in consultation with the SA government.

Like all sportsmen we don't believe it is worth endangering our lives in order to compete but we are not qualified to make judgements on security issues which is why we leave that to the experts.

Personally I feel extremely sorry for Pakistan's fans and cricketers that they will now miss out on seeing the best cricketers in the world and I sincerely hope the situation improves sufficiently to satisfy the experts and we can play the tournament next year.