Is anything about South African cricket less than what it was just six months ago when the team went to Bangladesh as undisputed heavyweight champions of Test cricket? The answer came on a hot afternoon at Newlands yesterday, a second or two after Ben Stokes had heaved a delivery from Kagiso Rabada high into a cloudless sky.Mid-on positioned himself under the descending ball. He steadied. He cupped his hands ... He dropped the catch.Mid-on was AB de Villiers.That's how bad things are. To point out that De Villiers recovered brilliantly to run out Stokes with a direct hit on the stumps is to prove the point.Stokes knew, like all of us thought we did, that De Villiers does not drop catches as easy as the one he had offered.So much so that Stokes had all but stopped mid-pitch. De Villiers was under it. He would be out. Game over.But De Villiers is no longer the wonderful player he was just a few months ago. Neither are any of the remaining giants whose shoulders SA have stood on so sturdily.At his press conference on Friday, one of them, Hashim Amla, looked like a captain sitting in a chair on a burning deck.In the past, Amla has always been the iceberg. Now, he is the Titanic.Why wouldn't he be? Not only had Amla presided over his team's thrashing at Kingsmead, which followed a thrashing in India, he had also been undermined by the involvement in the squad of his predecessor, Graeme Smith.Amla is among SA's greatest-ever players, but if he stays in the job much longer he is destined to be remembered as one of their worst-ever captains.That would be grossly unfair because a large chunk of Smith's success as SA's captain was built on the run machine that is - or was - Amla.As much as Amla has a responsibility to ride out the storm, he also has a duty to realise the truth that captaincy is not for him, let someone else do it for the good of his team and his own game.But who?..