Ken Borland

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Those people who have portrayed the Knights as a franchise in freefall have ignored the valid reasons, and gross misfortune, which afflicted their performances this summer, according to chief executive officer Johan van Heerden.

The Knights finished fifth in the Sunfoil Series, winning just two of their 10 matches, and fourth in the Momentum One-Day Cup, winning three of their 10 games. But those figures fail to take into account the horrendous run of injuries and bad weather that stalked the central franchise almost throughout the season.

Living in Bloemfontein or Kimberley, one doesn’t expect prolonged bouts of rain, but the Knights had two home One-Day Cup matches abandoned without a ball being bowled, leaving them an agonising one point short of a playoff place.

In the four-day competition, the Knights opened their campaign by having the better of a draw against the defending champion Titans in Kimberley, but then had matches washed out on successive weekends in Paarl, Pietermaritzburg and East London.

Once they could get on the field, the Knights were actually in reasonable form and, strangely enough, the only two Sunfoil Series matches they lost were in Bloemfontein, against the Warriors and the Cape Cobras.

As if the weather was not a bad enough blow to the hopes of the franchise, it also suffered an extraordinary run of injuries.

Morne van Wyk scored a century and Reeza Hendricks a half-century in that opening match against the Titans, but it would be the last game they played as the veteran wicketkeeper/batsman badly injured his shoulder and the young top-order prospect broke his ankle.

With Dean Elgar often on national duties, it meant the Knights had lost almost their entire first-choice top-order.

“Serious injuries hit us. We had the whole season planned but then we had to go without key players like Morne van Wyk and Reeza Hendricks. Those are quality players who are extremely important to our set-up,” Van Heerden said.

“Unfortunately, their replacements were not able to front up and Rilee Rossouw and Obus Pienaar became our most senior batsmen. But they are still struggling with things in their own games and that’s why we were 25 for four too often. If the other top-four batsmen had been there, it would have taken the pressure off them.”

Pace bowlers Quinton Friend and Dillon du Preez also suffered injuries at inopportune times, and Ryan McLaren was also often absent with the national team.

But the good news after a tough season in Bloemfontein and Kimberley is that all but two of their players have opted for the safety of renewing their contracts with the Knights.

Unfortunately, the two players leaving are both batsmen – Van Wyk and Ryan Bailey.

Van Wyk has been a great servant of Knights cricket and is the franchise’s leading run-scorer with over 4000 runs, but he will be relocating to Durban.

“Morne has never left Bloemfontein, he never played county cricket, and he believes he has maybe two years left in his career, so he just wants to play in a different area,” Van Heerden explained.

And Bailey, whose double-century in the opening round of Sunfoil Series matches accounted for over half of his total runs and he only managed 71 runs in six innings in the One-Day Cup, declined a one-year contract from the Knights and will take up a two-year offer from the Eastern Cape Warriors instead.

These departures – and the fact that the likes of Johan van der Wath and Du Preez are also coming to the end of their careers – would be a real pain in the neck for Van Heerden, were it not for the really cosy situation the Knights are in in terms of the talent coming through just below franchise level.

The Free State team have excelled in the amateur competitions, mounting a strong challenge in the three-day league, reaching the final of the one-day tournament and making an unbeaten start to the T20s.

The likes of Gihahn Cloete, Rudi Second, Michael Erlank, Patrick Botha and Corne Dry have already featured in the Knights team, while Pite van Biljon, Duanne Olivier, Keagan Rafferty and Romano Terblanche are waiting in the wings.

“The youngsters can see that there are spots opening up for them and the policy of the board is that if two players are on an equal footing, then we go for the younger player. We have a youth policy for the franchise and we want to lure youngsters here, we have great arrangements for that in place with the University of the Free State and the Central University of Technology,” Van Heerden said.

An example of this is the Ewie and Hansie Cronje Project which provides a bursary for a promising cricketer and student to study at UFS.

“The bursary pays for three years’ study and pocket money and their equipment is paid for too. They must be athletic and have the potential to study further, because we believe people who qualify with a degree become better decision-makers.

“It provides specialised training and physical monitoring for young fast bowlers and it was the idea of Paul Harris [the top banker], especially the scientific side, and he has funded it along with Johann Rupert and Rembrandt,” Van Heerden explained.

The excellent schools in the region are still providing the talent, with Diego Rosier and Rafferty being recent SA U19 captains and either of them could be playing for the Knights next summer.

The mood is certainly positive in the central region, despite the hardships of the last summer and the bigger picture is healthy, according to Van Heerden.

With all the varieties of delivery being bowled today – and the pressure to develop them – spinners these days run the risk of falling foul of the International Cricket Council’s rules on fair actions and specifically the 15 degree stipulation.

Sunfoil Dolphins off-spinner Prenelan Subrayen was the latest to be reported for a suspicious action, leading to remedial work and a rapid return to the field for the KwaZulu-Natal side, the 19-year-old playing an important role in their Ram Slam T20 Challenge campaign.

Subrayen’s problems started last August when he went to the ICC U19 World Cup in Australia. His action came under scrutiny after he played all six of South Africa’s matches on their way to the semi-finals, taking seven wickets at an average of just 14.42 and conceding only 2.43 runs per over.

Tests by both the Australian Institute of Sport and the Sports Science Institute of South Africa deemed Subrayen’s action to be illegal and in December he was sent back to his province to undergo rehabilitation.

The doosra is normally the delivery that causes problems, but in the case of Subrayen, it was his changes of pace that caused his elbow to bend beyond 15 degrees when bowling.

“I have the leggie, but no I don’t have the doosra. I only have three different balls and it was my variation of pace that was causing my elbow to bend,” Subrayen said.

The youngster took what is quite probably the worst news a bowler can get in his stride, and the fact that he was able to play for his club and the Dolphins side in the Franchise Cubs Week as a specialist batsman made all the difference.

“It was a shock, but not in a bad way. I took it as positive criticism and it made me work harder. I’ve had issues before, I’ve been tested before and it helped in a big way that I was still able to play as a batsman. I wasn’t totally torn away from the cricket field and I was able to keep my mind fresh and in the game,” Subrayen said.

Dolphins coach Lance Klusener, who worked with assistant coach Rivash Gobind and former Natal coach Phil Russell in rectifying Subrayen’s action, said the fact that the Glenwood High School product is so mature and has a very good understanding of his action ensured that the process took less than two months.

“Prenelan’s extremely mature for a 19-year-old and he knows exactly how his body works in terms of his action. That made the corrective work much easier and enabled the problem to get sorted ASAP.

“Normally it only happens when a bowler is 25 or 26 that they work out how their body feels, whether they’re falling over or not, whether they can self-correct or not. I get the feeling that Prenelan can already do that,” Klusener said.

After spending some time under the watchful eye of the trio of KZN coaches, Subrayen then travelled to Cape Town with the Dolphins as the 12^th man for a four-day game against the Cobras, allowing High Performance Manager Vincent Barnes the chance to work with him and give the go-ahead for the Verulam lad to be tested again.

“Initially the testing is done at their home base with every bowling session being videoed and every change being monitored. You can’t do it with the naked eye, you have to go back and compare the videos. The High Performance staff then work with the bowler for four to six days and when we think he’s ready for the final test, only then do we use the better cameras at the Sports Science Institute in Cape Town,” Barnes said.

“The bowler has to groove his new action, he has to learn it, he has to feel it,” the former Proteas bowling coach said.

“It wasn’t something very difficult to change, it was more about my feet positioning. The younger you are, the better you can change because as you get older, you get more used to your illegal action,” Subrayen said.

Apart from the hard work of Klusener, Gobind, Russell and Barnes, as well as previous input from specialist spin coaches Shafiek Abrahams and Paul Adams, Subrayen said he couldn’t have sailed through the process without the support of his parents, especially father Kugan, the Level III-certified head coach of Verulam Cricket Club.

But it clearly helps that Subrayen is a player who understands his action so well and Klusener has high hopes for his young charge.

“He potentially has 20 years of spin bowling left and he’s exceptionally talented. He knows what he wants to achieve and he’s a good batsman too, people will see that in time. The key is that he knows what he’s doing with the ball,” Klusener said.

The Subrayen case was complicated by the badly dislocated shoulder he suffered several years ago, but with the shoulder now at pretty much 100%, the jerkiness in his action gone and the experience from the hard school of knocks adding to the natural talent he undoubtedly has, the future is bright for the disciplined, but passionate youngster.

Jacques Faul is the new chief executive of Titans cricket, taking over from acting appointee Aniel Soma, who covered so efficiently in the wake of Elise Lombard’s tragic passing.

It may be considered a step down in some quarters for Faul, who was the acting CEO of Cricket South Africa for a year, but it is a return to franchise cricket that the former Western Transvaal player is excited about.

“I learnt a lot while I was with CSA, it was difficult, but we achieved what we set out to do, which was keeping the operations going and getting the sponsors back. It has also given me a more balanced view of cricket administration, having always been on the affiliate’s side of the fence before then. I wanted to stay in cricket and I want to make the Titans the best franchise in the world. It’s a fantastic organisation and I’m very privileged,” Faul said.

It has not been the best of timing for Faul with the Titans’ awful season a blow to their reputation as one of the country’s leading franchises. But the former North-West CEO has no doubts he can help get the amalgamation of the Northerns and Easterns cricket unions back up to the top.

“I want to take the organisation to a new level, but you can only react in four ways strategically when you move into a venture, and this applies from a pub to an accounting firm. You can stop, start, continue or change things.

“The Titans is a great organisation, so I’ll be continuing a lot of things. But my role demands that I stop, start and change certain things. Issues such as stadia and financial stability are always dynamic,” Faul said.

Faul played a major role in elevating the status of cricket in Potchefstroom when he became CEO in 2003, but he was actually brought up in Klerksdorp, where he played club cricket for 21 years and was elected president of the club when he was just 26.

Had he not been called into administration at such a young age, and shown such commercial vision, Faul might well have ended up coaching.

He has a Level III certificate and an academy at Klerksdorp High School and describes coaching as “what I enjoy most”.

It’s been the proverbial season horribilis for the Nashua Titans with the Ram Slam T20 Challenge providing the last chance for the dominant franchise of 2011/12 to get something out of the summer.

The four-day Sunfoil Series was particularly galling for the Titans, who went into the competition as the defending champions, but lost eight of their 10 matches and failed to win any. To make it even more traumatic, their defeats were by huge margins – one by an innings and 247 runs, three by 10 wickets, one by nine wickets and others by 161 runs and 393 runs. Six of their matches were all over in three days.

The root of their travails would appear to be that the reserve talent in the squad responded poorly to the challenge of stepping up and replacing the likes of Faf du Plessis, Jacques Rudolph, Albie Morkel, Farhaan Behardien, Marchant de Lange, Paul Harris and Morne Morkel, who for various reasons only played 15 Sunfoil Series matches between them.

“The four-day campaign was dreadful and there were a combination of reasons. But it’s fair to say that the youth didn’t come through, they just didn’t execute their skills, either batting or bowling.

“Sometimes youngsters come in and take to it straight away, for others it takes them a while. We were playing three or four youngsters at once, whereas in an ideal world you’d like to knit one or two at a time into the team. We’ve got to work really hard,” coach Matthew Maynard admitted.

The Titans were, of course, rocked by twin tragedies at the start of the summer, with Maynard losing his son, Tom, a Surrey cricketer who was considered one of the most promising in England, and long-time and much-loved CEO Elise Lombard then passing away in August.

But their followers were heartened by their start to the season, making the semi-finals of the Champions League and then reaching the Momentum One-Day Cup playoff.

It is fair to say that the franchise are baffled by how the season just totally unravelled from that point.

Jacques Faul is the new CEO of the Titans and he admits that a franchise will always be judged by the performance of the team.

“The team is the showcase of the franchise and the play on the field is what we sell, if you like. I’ve been impressed with Matt Maynard as a coach, but even he doesn’t seem to really know where it all went wrong. He has worked out what we need though, going forward, and this has been such a successful franchise so I don’t think it will be difficult to return to winning ways,” Faul said.

A late resurgence in the T20 Challenge could, of course, turn around the whole season, especially in terms of the financial rewards it provides a franchise.

And the increased financial resources means Maynard could be in the market for some new players, while yesterday’s men slip from the scene.

“We still need to strengthen the squad and we’ll look to do that,” Maynard said.

Faul, drawing from his experience of helping to build the high-flying bizhub Highveld Lions team, is frustrated that the Titans allowed players like Hardus Viljoen, Imran Tahir and Gulam Bodi to slip away.

“You need to hang on to your talent, we were losing matches to teams with guys who used to play for the Titans, and you need a good mix of old and young players. It took the Highveld Lions a while to build their team. We know our national players are not going to play, it would be naïve to rely on them. We have to win without them and we have to create more stars to win,” Faul said.

The Titans management would seem to want a top-order batsman, a paceman and perhaps an experienced spinner, Harris having retired, who specialises in four-day cricket.

Of course, the Titans will look a different team when the likes of Rudolph, Albie Morkel, Behardien and De Lange play regularly.

“What the senior players bring to the table is match-winning performances. But the positive from the season is that guys like Graeme van Buuren, Francois le Clus and JP de Villiers look to have the potential to succeed at that level. The talent is there,” Maynard said.

The pressure will now be on the team and coaching staff to ensure that talent makes the Titans way more competitive next season.