CSA awards see Maharaj and Mlaba win big as they won the men’s and women’s players of the year awards respectively.
Maharaj and Mlaba win the big ones at CSA annual awards.
At the annual CSA awards for the 2024–25 season, left-arm spinners Keshav Maharaj and Nonkululeko Mlaba were awarded South Africa’s men’s and women’s players of the year, respectively.
The 2025 Champions Trophy and the T20 World Cups (both men’s and women’s) from the previous year are taken into consideration during the judgement period. However, the World Test Championship final, which South Africa won, is not.
Performances like Kagiso Rabada’s Lord’s nine-for and Aiden Markram’s mace-winning century will therefore be taken into account the following year. However, his peers chose Rabada as the men’s player of the year.
Over the past year, South Africa has focused on the Test and T20I formats, where both Maharaj and Mlaba excelled.
Between August 2024 and January 2025, Maharaj claimed 40 wickets in seven Test matches, including five-wicket hauls in Chattogram and Gqeberha and twin four-fors against the West Indies. In addition, he took the third-most wickets for South Africa at the 2024 T20 World Cup.
Mlaba’s 12 wickets at the T20 World Cup were the second-highest total in the women’s division, trailing only New Zealand’s Amelia Kerr. She is also South Africa’s second-highest Test wicket-taker ever, having taken 10 for 157 against England in December, making her the only South African woman to take 10 wickets in a Test match.
After helping South Africa to the WTC final with two hundreds in the home summer against Sri Lanka in Durban and Pakistan in Cape Town, Temba Bavuma was voted Test player of the year.
Anrich Nortje, who was South Africa’s top bowler at the T20 World Cup, got the T20 player of the year title, and Heinrich Klaasen, who is already retired, was named the ODI player of the year for leading the run charts in the Pakistan series in an otherwise light 50-over schedule. At the T20 World Cup, South Africa’s most cost-effective bowler, Ottneil Baartman, won rookie of the year.
Among the coaches, Ahmed Amla, who managed Kwa-Zulu Natal Inland’s elevation to division one, earned the award for that level, while Russell Domingo, a former South Africa coach and current Lions coach, was awarded division one coach of the year after his team won both the four-day and T20 competitions.
While Annerie Dercksen, the ICC’s 2024 newcomer, won women’s ODI player of the year, Mlaba was also voted the women’s players’ player of the year. In the May tri-series against India and Sri Lanka, she hit her first ODI century and was the top run scorer. Women’s Newcomer of the Year went to seamer Ayanda Hlubi.