Ken Borland

One of the more pleasing aspects of the Proteas’ previous season was how well head coach Mark Boucher and his assistant Enoch Nkwe dovetailed together, which is probably not too surprising given the similarities between them in coaching philosophy.

It could have been a lot more awkward than it was when Boucher took over as head coach in December, Nkwe effectively being demoted to assistant coach because he had been the interim team director when the Proteas toured India in September/October.

But Nkwe is the sort of coach who always puts the team first and Boucher has always been known to be a great team man. As a player and coach, the record-breaking wicketkeeper’s attributes of honest communication, competitiveness, toughness, courage and discipline are well-known.

They are shared qualities that bind them together.

That the 37-year-old Nkwe has a similar coaching philosophy to the 43-year-old Boucher became clear when I was fortunate enough to sit in on the virtual coaches conference he held with the Lions recently. Apart from the many coaches within the Lions system, including his successor as franchise head coach Wandile Gwavu, there were coaches from as far afield as the Eastern Cape, Uganda and New Zealand logged in to hear Nkwe share his thoughts, and the Soweto-born former all-rounder certainly left them with many great insights to ponder.

Nkwe sees the coach’s role as being to create an environment that enables the team to reach success.

“It’s important that you are all speaking the same language, you need the environment to be freed up and authentic. There needs to be clear role-definition which is one of the most powerful coaching tools and it can determine the brand of cricket played. And if the whole process is done properly then the coach is in a much stronger position to have tough conversations.

“You’ve got to be totally honest, one can feel sorry for the player but you can’t sugarcoat things or beat around the bush. It may be uncomfortable at the moment, but going forward the player will have respect for you because of your honesty. Don’t be scared or shy to have those honest conversations; the players know the moment you are bullshitting,” Nkwe said.

In order to discover his own coaching philosophy, Nkwe, who began his coaching career as player-coach for Dutch club HCC Rood en Wit in 2005, said he looked at his own character and what he consistently did as both a player and coach.

He came up with the word ‘competitive’, a word closely associated with Boucher himself.

“You need to master the little things, you’re not going to get everything right but you strive for a level of excellence. And you have to find a way to make it work. Things are not ever going to go all smoothly, and when things are not great, that’s when you have to overcome the challenge. You have to keep finding ways to be successful. There’s always a way and you can’t feel sorry for yourself,” Nkwe said.

You can imagine the exact same words coming out of Mark Boucher’s mouth. To be courageous also seemed to be second-nature for the gritty Eastern Cape product.

“You need courage and consistency to promote your vision and the confidence to go into a new environment and not compromise your beliefs because then you will lose the team. If you want to be liked, then coaching is not the industry for you,” Nkwe said frankly.

Boucher himself has spoken positively of their burgeoning relationship.

“Enoch and I have had some great conversations and I think we understand each other. We certainly have the same ideas and agree on how to do it. We know we’ll have hard calls to make but we’re not scared to make them.

“He has a good relationship with the youngsters I don’t know properly yet and he takes a load off my hands. I appreciate it and we will just keep working hard together and drive our vision together,” Boucher said recently.

Nkwe has also been a great respecter of new Director of Cricket Graeme Smith, ever since their paths crossed as schoolkids. Nkwe played for St Stithians and Smith was at King Edward VII. The future national captain would skipper Nkwe in the Gauteng Schools side of 1999, Smith’s second year of Khaya Majola Week cricket and the first of three years in which Nkwe played. Interestingly, both Smith and Nkwe scored centuries on their first-class debuts.

“Graeme was always a great example to me, he worked out at 15 years old that he needed to make peace with his technique. He knew he was not the best-looking batsman but he had a clear vision of what his strengths were and he made sure he thrived on that and his mental strength. I remember at Khaya Majola Week in 1999 just trying to understand how he could score so many hundreds at such a young age.

“Graeme found a way to make it work, he didn’t fight his technique. It was pure mental strength and he was lucky to have a coach that encouraged that,” Nkwe said.

I would dare to predict that South African cricket will realise in future just how lucky they were to have Smith, Boucher and Nkwe working together to steer the Proteas out of their current turmoil.

In the wake of Duanne Olivier becoming the latest South African cricketer to drop the Kolpak bombshell, it would be only human for Cricket South Africa chief executive Thabang Moroe to be feeling betrayed and to be considering his options when it comes to ensuring that his organisation and the staff involved with the national teams don’t have to go through that pain again, never mind the considerable resources expended – and now wasted – on grooming a player to make a successful entry into international cricket.

Olivier was probably the good news story of the summer, getting a prolonged run in the national team thanks to injuries to Lungi Ngidi and then Vernon Philander, and his immediate success prompted the Proteas brainstrust to take drastic steps to keep him in the side: World-class spinner Keshav Maharaj was sidelined and they even went into some games a batsman short, further weakening an already struggling batting line-up, just to ensure their new-found Enforcer could keep charging in and taking wickets.

The falling-over-backwards continued at board level as Olivier was offered a two-year contract, something highly unusual. The fact that everyone else only received a one-year contract when the new deals were announced on Friday shows just how obliging they were trying to be to the 26-year-old Free State fast bowler.

And then it turns out that all the time he was talking about his Proteas achievements being a dream come true and how proud he was, all the time he was negotiating with CSA for a two-year contract, he had already decided to sign a lucrative Kolpak deal with Yorkshire.

South African cricket has been through this betrayal before of course, with Kyle Abbott and Rilee Rossouw jumping ship midway through the previous home series against Sri Lanka in January 2017. Abbott had spent the previous weeks gushing about how delighted he was to be finally getting a prolonged run for the Proteas while Rossouw, after CSA had spent huge amounts of medical bills on him and persisted with through one of the worst duck-laden starts to an international career, merely dumped his employees with barely a word spoken.

This is not a Kolpak move like Morne Morkel’s, who, after more than 10 years of service to South African cricket, decided his body could no longer take the grind of the international game and nobody bemoaned him giving his pension a well-earned boost in England.

Olivier is in his prime, has played just 10 Tests and two ODIs, and Ottis Gibson and Faf du Plessis have very much been making plans for the future around having him in the fast bowling pool.

Olivier is, of course, represented and managed by an agent, Weber van Wyk. Who just happens to be the same agent who organised the Kolpak deals for Abbott and Rossouw, hence the same scarcely ethical modus operandi that clearly cannot be termed ‘negotiating in good faith’. Van Wyk has earned a fortune exporting South African talent to England.

If you were the CEO of a multimillion rand company that spends millions on developing their key assets, only to see them up-and-leave as soon as they get promoted to a level that makes them attractive to others, what would you do? If the same person was behind three of your prize assets leaving, would you reconsider having any dealings with that agent or his clientele ever again?

When Olivier was called up to replace Abbott for the third Test against Sri Lanka in 2017, he told CricInfo: “I want to play as long as possible for my country. When I am playing, I don’t think about stuff off the field. I haven’t considered a Kolpak deal.”

Who would have thought he would follow Abbott so closely and so quickly, swelling his pockets but surely to the detriment of his standing in the game.

Sadly, we have seen this lack of patriotism stretch to rugby circles in Bloemfontein as well. Apart from the despicable shenanigans of Johan Goosen in retiring from the game for a year just to get out of a recently-extended mega-millions contract in France, so he could sign an even bigger contract with a rival club, a school like Grey College is not even pretending to support South African rugby anymore, having signed an exclusive deal with Goosen’s Montpellier club to feed players into their – and therefore France’s – pipeline.

Money can buy many things, but it will never be able to buy respect.

South African cricket was obviously already in troubled financial waters before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, but outgoing Cape Cobras chief executive Nabeal Dien on Wednesday gave a gloomy forecast for the future of the game over the next couple of years in this country.

Dien is retiring after being at the helm of cricket in the Western Cape since February 2015 and he admitted to some relief that it won’t be his responsibility to negotiate one of the biggest franchises in the country through the coming turmoil as the game looks to recover from their governance scandals as well as simply just trying to get back on to the field again.

“It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that Cricket South Africa was already in dire straits and already talking about making cuts, and all that will obviously be exacerbated due to the virus. The game will have to reinvent itself with the money and resources we have left. It’s going to take a collective effort for us to survive and remain competitive.

“If not much has changed by June/July then we run the risk of not playing at all for the rest of this year, only starting cricket again in January next year. I’m sure that there will then be a flood of members and suite-holders wanting to withdraw. And it would be a huge challenge to play without spectators because it costs money just to host a game and that revenue has to be offset from ticket sales.

“At the moment, CSA just gives us hosting fees, which isn’t enough to cover costs, so we supplement that with our 40% share of ticket sales. To now also have to pay for thermometers, sanitisers, washing of the stadium, will require a rethink. I think this whole situation is going to take away a lot from what it means for us to go and watch cricket,” Dien said on a conference call from Cape Town on Wednesday.

Dien also said he supported a new playing structure in which the 12 provinces would be divided into two pools with promotion/relegation. That would mean teams like Border and Northern Cape, who come from historically economically depressed areas, trying to compete on the same playing field as franchises like the Cobras, Lions and Titans, who come from the major city centres. Dien said he nevertheless expected them to be competitive.

“I unashamedly support going to 12 teams but it’s important to have an A and B Section with promotion/relegation, for the four-day and one-day cricket. I think this has been accepted as the way forward, the Members Council have agreed in principle, but with Covid-19 we don’t know if there will be further changes. The Mzansi Super League will continue but will be different, with the six local franchises plus two new teams based in Free State and Border.

“There’s always this debate around transformation and playing opportunities and having 12 teams will resolve that. It’s up to the affiliates to be competitive and there should be better rewards for the top six. Players will also gravitate towards the top six and the people who run the bottom six teams must do their work, especially in terms of younger players, they will need a vibrant academy system,” Dien said.

CSA announced at the end of March that the six franchises would still compete in 2020/21, playing in two groups, with four home-and-away matches in their own pool and three cross-pool matches, before a final between the two group winners.

Hilton Moreeng has completed his second term as national women’s coach with his reputation intact but whether he continues in charge of the Proteas or not will depend on how new Director of Cricket Graeme Smith sees the long-term future of the team. And captain Dane van Niekerk said on Thursday that she has full faith in Smith’s judgement, even if she may not entirely agree with his viewpoint that the women’s game requires specialist input.

Moreeng, who first became South Africa coach in December 2012, has led the team to the semi-finals of both of the most recent T20 and 50-over World Cups, in both cases losing narrowly to the eventual champions, Australia and England respectively. They have also already automatically qualified for the next 50-over World Cup, in New Zealand early next year, after the points from their postponed series with Australia were shared.

Smith said last week that the post of national women’s coach has been advertised and that he saw it as being “different to the men’s game so we need to improve the pipeline to the national side, as we grow, getting more players who have played for that national team”. The 42-year-old Moreeng is believed to have re-applied for the post.

Van Niekerk said, however, in a teleconference on Thursday that she did not believe in treating the men’s and women’s games differently.

“Graeme came to Australia to meet with me and Mignon du Preez during the ICC World T20, to see where the team was at and where we wanted to go. He’s certainly passionate about the game and we are excited to work with him. It’s more CSA’s job to decide on the coach and we will respect their decision, either to keep Hilton or to make a change. Our relationship with CSA is good enough that we can talk about anything.

“But I believe cricket is cricket, the principles stay the same, although in the women’s team you have to deal with different personalities and hormones, of course, while the men tend to be more cool, calm and collected. But I’m a big believer that looking at the men’s and women’s games differently is not the way to go forward, I would like to change that stigma because we train just as hard as the men,” Van Niekerk said.

The Covid-19 pandemic not only caused the series with Australia to be called off but it is playing havoc with South Africa’s planning leading into the World Cup starting on February 6. A tour of the West Indies scheduled for the end of May is almost certainly not going to go ahead, while the tour to England in August/September is also under threat.

“Hopefully we get back on the park sooner rather than later and the next World Cup is very important for us and our sole focus at the moment. We have unbelievable talent and I wouldn’t be captain if I didn’t believe we could win a World Cup, we’ve been very close twice and we just need to stay patient.

“But Covid-19 has affected the momentum we created at the last World Cup, which was so successful for women’s cricket in general, it would have been nice to continue that hype, especially since it was going to be us against the world champions a couple of weeks later. But we have the World Cup next year to create that hype again and I think there are a lot of special things still waiting for this team,” Van Niekerk said.