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Ken Borland



Teams try to ignore altitude at Loftus, but summer heat is 1 factor they can’t brush off 0

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Ken

Many teams coming to Loftus Versfeld these days try to ignore the effects of altitude, but one factor the Bulls are hoping Munster are not able to brush aside in their United Rugby Championship clash in Pretoria on Saturday is the late afternoon heat of a summer’s day.

Kick-off on Saturday is at 4.05pm and, judging by the weather forecast for Pretoria this week, the temperature could still be a warm 28°, a far cry from the 7° Munster was shivering in on Monday.

“We hope the conditions at home will give us a bit of an advantage,” Bulls flyhalf Chris Smith said on Monday. “The coastal teams battle with altitude here and hopefully the sun is out on Saturday.

“Hopefully it’s cooking for the 4pm kickoff and that heat could actually be more important for us than the altitude. We hope we can chase them around the field with the sun beaming down.

“We want to make them tired and then hopefully the game will open up a bit later on. But it’s going to be a good challenge for us, to measure ourselves against top players in the URC,” Smith said.

It’s a big sporting week for the Smith family, with Chris’s teenage brother Daniel scoring his maiden first-class century for the Western Province cricket team. The 27-year-old Chris Smith is a key figure in the Bulls side at present, with Morne Steyn suspended and Johan Goosen out injured, and he has enjoyed very good outings against both Zebre in Parma and Griquas in Kimberley.

“I’ve definitely felt the pressure because I’ve mostly played off the bench for the last two years, I have not played many full 80s,” Smith said. “But I see it more as an opportunity.

“It’s more the pressure I’m putting on myself to make use of this opportunity than any external pressure.

“I’ve been working on playing more flat and being more in the defence’s faces. I do tend to hang back a bit, I sometimes rely more on my passing game than my running game,” Smith said.

T20 Challenge has allowed stars and prospects space to shine 0

Posted on March 24, 2022 by Ken

This summer’s premier T20 tournament may be confined to a bubble in Gqeberha, but there has still been space for some highly entertaining, impressive cricket in the first week of the CSA T20 Challenge.

The eight provinces have all played twice and the Boland Rocks and Free State Knights are the only teams who have not yet won a game. Overall it has been a highly competitive event, with Boland coming agonisingly close to beating the Northerns Titans.

The North-West Dragons, with the only bonus point so far, and Western Province are the two sides who have won both their matches, but the gap between them and the KZN Dolphins, Central Gauteng Lions, Northerns and Eastern Province Warriors is not large.

The Lions get the chance to show that on Sunday when they take on WP.

Looking at the bigger picture, and a future that includes another T20 World Cup in October/November in Australia, who are the players that the national selectors will be keeping an eye on?

One first needs to ask where are the gaps in the current Proteas team, who performed better than expected in the previous T20 World Cup, albeit in conditions that will be very different to Australia.

The well-travelled David Miller has world-class T20 stats – he averaged 47 last year at a strike-rate of 149 – and is a certainty for Australia, but there is hopefully space in the squad for another finisher, someone who can be groomed to succeed the 32-year-old somewhere down the line.

Two youngsters who have caught the eye are the 21-year-old Tristan Stubbs of EP and 23-year-old Donovan Ferreira of the Titans. They are scoring at a strike-rate of 189 and 152 respectively in this tournament, while Stubbs has a career strike-rate of 148 and Ferreira 157.

The Lions owe a considerable debt to Sisanda Magala for ensuring they are not with Boland and Free State at the bottom of the log with zero points. The burly pace bowler has been superb with the ball, especially at the death, and his eight overs so far have cost just 6.62 runs per over, and he chipped in with a couple of key wickets that killed off the KZN charge to victory on Thursday.

Magala also shone with the bat. Coming in at 95/5 in the 12th over, he scored a punishing 37 off just 27 balls to lift the Lions to 156/8, which proved to be just enough.

Magala has not yet shown the same expertise at international level, but in a team that is often criticised for their bowling skills on flat pitches (expected in Australia), he brings a package that still looks useful.

South Africa will no doubt have to restructure their team a bit in Australia to reflect the more pace-friendly conditions, but young fast bowlers have not exactly been shoving their hands up in the CSA T20. The best quicks have been veterans like Magala, Hardus Viljoen, Junior Dala and Beuran Hendricks.

But it has been pleasing to see the change in mindset surrounding the use of spin that Mark Boucher spearheaded in the national team start to filter down to the provinces. Spinners have done wonderfully well on the slow pitches at St George’s Park and some potential stars are starting to come through.

Left-armer Johannes Diseko has been key to North-West’s surprise charge to the top of the log, while Proteas like George Linde, Senuran Muthusamy, Bjorn Fortuin and Aaron Phangiso continue to shine.

Prenelan Subrayen has shown he is a quality off-spinner and Imraan Manack is key to the Boland attack; 19-year-old leg-spinner Caleb Seleka looks highly promising for North-West too.

Most positively, the presence of Proteas stars like Miller, Tabraiz Shamsi, Janneman Malan, Quinton de Kock and Dwaine Pretorius has ensured that quality runs through this summer’s CSA T20 Challenge.

Bangladesh Tests at same venues where Sri Lanka rocked the cricket universe 0

Posted on March 09, 2022 by Ken

South Africa’s two Tests against Bangladesh at the end of the summer were confirmed on Wednesday as being played at Kingsmead and St George’s Park, which is hardly earth-shattering news. But it is the exact same schedule as in February 2019 when the cricket universe was shaken by Sri Lanka’s 2-0 series win.

The first Test in Durban starts on March 31 and the second Test in Port Elizabeth begins on April 8.

Sri Lanka shocked the Proteas at Kingsmead as they chased down 304 thanks to Kusal Perera’s incredible 153 not out and a 78-run last-wicket stand, and then the tourists won by eight wickets in Port Elizabeth to become the first sub-continental team to win a Test series in South Africa.

The series was the last for legendary fast bowler Dale Steyn and he remembers the uncertainty created by conditions that were unfamiliar for the home team but suited the visitors.

“The Port Elizabeth game was my last Test and we were just desperate to try and knock them over,” Steyn told The Citizen on Wednesday. “We were under pressure and that leads to cloudy minds sometimes.

“But that’s what happens when conditions are not in your favour at home. I think whenever we host a subcontinent team, you kind of want to play them on the Highveld, where there is bounce and seam movement.

“Those are unfamiliar conditions for them and you want to take them out of their comfort zone. But the conditions at Kingsmead and St George’s Park will even things out a bit because Bangladesh will be good on slower pitches.

“Maybe it’s because the Test matches won’t go as long as at SuperSport Park for instance. It will make things a bit more difficult for us, but I still think we well have enough to knock them over,” Steyn said.

One good thing about playing on the coast is that the pitches should be easier for the Proteas batsmen to shine on after a long period when they have not been able to advertise their real abilities at home due to a succession of tough surfaces to bat on.

“The batsmen had a rough time against India, although Dean Elgar was fantastic and Keegan Petersen was phenomenal. And now New Zealand will have seam and swing, if not so much pace and bounce,” Steyn said.

“So conditions should be a little bit more in favour of the batsmen against Bangladesh and our guys will be stoked with that.

“I still think we have a fantastic team, especially if we have our full seam attack with Anrich Nortje and Kagiso Rabada.”

Hypocrisy angers me as great summer of sport being threatened 0

Posted on January 10, 2022 by Ken

What should have been a great summer of cricket, golf and rugby in South Africa is being threatened by the Omicron variant of Covid, which is an annoyance us sports lovers are getting used to, but what really angers me is the superior, hypocritical attitude of many overseas administrators and professionals.

The bio-secure bubbles that South African sporting bodies have put in place have proven to be exceptionally safe, a credit to the outstanding scientists and doctors we have in the medical sphere. But for many of those in the West, we are in Africa and therefore all the old stereotypes of being backward and unadvanced apply. It is an insulting and bigoted attitude.

Plus South African society is probably safer than many in Europe and America, where most people are ignoring preventative measures like masks, hand sanitising and social distancing. In America, there has also been a sizeable section of the population who have refused to get vaccinated.

It was the United Kingdom who began all the trouble by rushing to implement travel bans before they had even received all the scientific information about Omicron. The fact that the boorish Boris Johnson and his ill-informed medical advisors, who have grossly mishandled Britain’s Covid response over the last couple of years, are setting the tone for the global response is infuriating. We have someone who has presided over a country that now has more than 50 000 cases a day declaring South Africa, with 11 500 cases a day, a pariah.

And it’s not just those three major sports that have been affected: The U21 Women’s Junior Hockey World Cup was set to be held in Potchefstroom, the first time the sport would have staged a world cup in Africa, but that has been called off, and the Commonwealth Wrestling Championships, to be held this weekend in Pretoria, have also been deferred indefinitely.

The United Rugby Championship and the Sunshine Tour golf organisation have already seen their December events grossly disrupted by the Omicron panic, while Cricket South Africa will be hoping against hopes that the Indian tour, which is worth $100 million to the financially-strained organisation, will go ahead as scheduled.

The problem for all local sports bodies is that overseas competitors will now start using Covid fears as an excuse not to fulfil their commitments. India’s cricket players, safe in the knowledge that no-one in world cricket dares to ruffle the feathers of the BCCI, will do whatever they want, and we can only hope captain Virat Kohli’s love of Test cricket and desire to win a series in South Africa sways the day.

As we have seen in previous waves of Covid, things will happen quickly as the number of cases rises exponentially. But will overseas sportsmen be safer back home, where this variant almost certainly originated, or in a bio-bubble in South Africa?

Will the travel bans be lifted now that there is compelling evidence that Omicron did not originate in Southern Africa but was merely detected here first? One day the identities of the overseas diplomats who brought it into Botswana at the beginning of November will be revealed. The fact that the Munster rugby team had 14 positive cases by the start of this week, having been in a bubble since their arrival in South Africa, suggests they probably arrived with Covid, possibly catching it on the plane coming over, and have now been spreading it amongst themselves.

Of course it will always be the African countries that are at fault in the eyes of many of our Western visitors.

Cardiff rugby player Matthew Morgan ranted on social media about being dragged to South Africa in the middle of a pandemic and called the whole situation a “shambles”. Instead of being so privileged, perhaps he should be reading more of what leading scientists are saying.

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    1 John 2:5 – “But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him.”

    James 2:14 – “What good is it if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds?”.

    Love without action is useless.

    If you love God unreservedly, you will offer your best to him and be willing to serve him wherever he wishes to use you.

    Love has to manifest itself practically.

    “Love requires uplifting and inspirational deeds.

    “How genuine can your love for God truly be if you are aware of a serious need and do nothing to alleviate it?”- Solly Ozrovech, A Shelter From The Storm



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