Not worried, but no blind eye over SA issues - van Zyl

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South Africa do not need to panic about the decline in the national cricket team's performances or the structures lower down but do need to devise steps for improvement, according to CSA's general manager of cricket, Corrie van Zyl.

Van Zyl, a former national caretaker coach, is one of the people involved in plotting South Africa's revival and does not believe they are that far away from seeing success again despite Tuesday's news that the Test team has slipped to No.6 on the rankings having been top four months ago.

"I am not worried about South African cricket to be honest. Some of our performances this season, I could explain. It wasn't nice to see but I could understand them," van Zyl said at the launch of the Africa T20 Cup in Cape Town. "For example, Dale Steyn was not available for a big part of the Test series and we had three youngsters that bowled so there was inexperience.

"Yet there was an opportunity for them to come through and look how Kagiso [Rabada] came through. Where I would have been worried is if we didn't have the Kagiso's and Chris Morris' coming through. That would have been a different story."

In the 2015-16 season South Africa lost successive Test series against India and England, with Steyn missing three-quarters of the matches, and crashed out of the World T20 in the first round. Their dramatic descent prompted CSA to enlist the services of 1995 World Cup-winning rugby captain Francois Pienaar, who is part of a four-person panel conducting a review into national team performance, and to put together a separate 14-person group to investigate the state of domestic cricket.

Van Zyl is not on either committee but, as someone intricately involved with development, is certain to have some input and the message he will deliver is that things are not as bad as they may seem.

Despite his optimism, van Zyl admitted South Africa have to do some soul-searching about how to turn those individual successes into team triumphs. "I'm not turning a blind eye to our performances. We have to go and look at it and ask how can we do better and we have the reviews to look at that," he said. "We must be totally open and say let's see what the review brings. It's an opportunity for us to research whether change is possible and whether change would be good or not."

Part of the changes at the international level could involve the coaching department, where Russell Domingo's job has come under the microscope. Lower down, the spotlight is trained on whether the current franchise system is strong enough and perception, especially among former players, is that it is not.

Van Zyl is specifically tackling this and has so far not found anything alarming. "A lot of things are built on perception, even this thing of there is no depth. We can't work on perception" he said. "I have just looked at stats and performance benchmarks - things like how many batsmen have been scoring above 45, how many bowlers are averaging less than 24 and going for less than six runs an over, as examples -and what we do is track the depth and pull it back over a number of years. We see fluctuations over the five years. It's not that we now seeing a huge dip or a huge decline in standard."

One of the things van Zyl discovered is that the number of first-class matches ending in three days instead of four was up last season but something similar happened three years ago. He is in the processes of understanding why the first-class competition yielded those results and coming up with solutions to avoid it happening again.

"If there is a little bit of a decline we mustn't say it's just a trend, we need to ask what we can do to change it. Do we need to improve our coaching to improve performances again? Was it pitches?," van Zyl asked. "We have built in very specific measures to see how things are going and we build strategy on that. It's important in any sport that when you build strategy you build it on something concrete."

Once South Africa have a clear roadmap to redemption they will begin implementing it for the 2016-17 season, which starts earlier than usual. New Zealand visit for two Tests in August before Australia play ODIs in South Africa, then there are three Tests in Australia and a home series against Sri Lanka.

Does van Zyl think South Africa can climb the rankings again?

"I have no doubt that we will be there again," he said. "I'm not a prophet of doom and I suppose in my position I can't be but honestly, I know we have talent in this country. Of that there is no question."