Neither has played for South Africa since June, with Jansen rested from the West Indies Tests and Coetzee injured just before the matches. Currently, Jansen has a shoulder concern and Coetzee a hip issue, but even before those niggles, CSA had recognised the need to give them a break as part of a broader strategy to keep bowlers at their best.

"If you look at what he has in store for him, starting from when the Bangladesh Test series starts, it's non-stop cricket," Walter said. "When KG puts on a jersey for South Africa, we want him to be delivering his best and we've seen that when his pace is up, that's when he's most impactful and effective. It's just not possible to keep expecting him to do that if we don't provide these rest, recovery and conditioning windows. This was a perfect time to give him that opportunity. We don't have a lot of Test matches so to have our best bowlers available and firing for Test cricket is absolutely imperative. So there's a collaboration between myself and Shukri [Conrad - the red-ball coach] to make sure that that happens."

"The reality is we can't rely on one group of players to win games for South Africa and so the players that you see in the squad are either high potential players that we believe can make big contributions for South Africa moving forward, or the next best players in the country"

"The reality is we can't rely on one group of players to win games for South Africa and so the players that you see in the squad are either high potential players that we believe can make big contributions for South Africa moving forward, or the next best players in the country," Walter said. "We want to make sure that we have a bigger group of players that can win games for South Africa. If we want to keep relying on the same faces to do that, what happens with injury, what happens with retirement, what happens in all those instances? The only way to know is to keep exposing players to international cricket."