Ken Borland

Heino Kuhn’s prospects of becoming the South African national team wicketkeeper hinge on the form and fitness of a couple of other players right now, but the 28-year-old is inching his way closer and closer to the side through sheer weight of runs.

AB de Villiers currently holds the gloves in all three formats, but one of the world’s most talented batsmen has not scored a century at international level in nine months and has recurring back problems.

Thami Tsolekile is his official understudy on tour in Australia but there seems to be a lack of confidence in his batting, with his first-class average being 29.01.

Kuhn, on the other hand, has a first-class batting average of 46.17 but his appearances for South Africa have thus far been limited to five T20 internationals, in which he has batted four times but only once come to the crease with more than four overs left in the innings.

But the Titans batsman believes the time is now for him to step up and claim the mantle as Mark Boucher’s long-term successor.

“I’ve definitely made the wicketkeeping place in the national side my goal for the season, my whole thinking heading into the season was about getting into the Proteas side,” Kuhn admitted to Business Day on Wednesday.

And, right now, Kuhn is in superb form with the bat as well. He has scored 107 and 41 in his two Momentum One-Day Cup innings and averaged 101.50 in the Titans’ two Sunfoil Series four-day matches this season.

Mother Cricket has the tendency, however, to get her own back on players who think too far ahead and Kuhn stressed that, although the national team was a very definite goal, he was focusing on performing for his team first.

“I’m not breaking my head worrying about why I’m not in the national team, I’m just going out there to enjoy every game and help my team win trophies. Personally, I’ve been batting well and I scored a century in my last game, but we weren’t happy with the way we played as a team in the first two four-day matches and we made a bad start to the one-day competition,” Kuhn said.

Whether De Villiers, one of South Africa’s key top-order batsmen, should even be keeping wicket is debatable with many of the owners of the sharpest cricketing brains around saying the workload is too much.

But Kuhn is happy to take on the responsibility of both gloveman and specialist batsman.

“I love to open the batting, especially in four-day cricket, and seeing off the new ball is always a good feeling. There are always a lot of gaps at the start of the innings, so any time you pierce the infield, you get four runs.

“But it is hard work keeping wicket as well and that’s why I float up and down the order with the Titans. If I had to play for South Africa, I’d probably only bat seven or eight, but that’s basically the same as opening the batting because you’ll be up against the second new ball,” Kuhn said.

The Affies product is also the owner of one of the best pair of hands in the country and, as a package, certainly warrants a look from the national selectors.

Whatever other talents Nashua Titans coach Matthew Maynard may have, it is his powers of encouragement and motivation that have been to the fore lately as he has lifted his team from a humiliating opening defeat into a position of strength in the Momentum One-Day Cup.

The Titans have shrugged off their catastrophic 269-run loss at the hands of the bizhub Highveld Lions – the heaviest between two leading provincial sides in local history – to win their next two matches and rise to second on the log ahead of Friday’s match against the Sunfoil Dolphins in Durban.

And, as fast bowler CJ de Villiers revealed to Sapa on Wednesday, Maynard revived his team by telling them that nothing else they did this season could possibly be worse than their performance that dark day in Centurion.

“A lot of credit for our turnaround must go to the coach [Maynard]. Everyone was shellshocked, nobody knew where to put their heads. But the coach said this is the worst we’ll ever play and that lifted a lot of pressure off us. We know we’re a good team and it just takes one guy to lift us,” De Villiers said.

The lift came five days later in Benoni as a fine all-round team effort saw the Titans beat the defending champions Nashua Mobile Cape Cobras and they then hammered the Chevrolet Knights last weekend to climb into second on the log, 10 points behind the Lions, but with a game in hand.

The Titans will be eager to maintain the momentum and stay in touch with the Lions by beating the bottom-placed Dolphins on Friday, or else they run the risk of being overtaken by the Knights or Cobras in the race for second place and a home qualifier.

The team that tops the standings qualifies automatically to host the final.

Of course, given the recent weather in Durban it would be quite an achievement just to complete the game. The south-westerly wind has been consistently blowing rain up the coast and she also ensures the Sahara Stadium Kingsmead pitch retains a lot of its traditional spite.

While the Titans spinners have been their most effective bowlers in the competition thus far, De Villiers said the pacemen could make an impact in Durban on Friday.

“The last few games, we haven’t really fired as a fast bowling unit and we’ve been leaking runs in the first 20 overs. We’ve spoken about it and we will be looking to improve against the Dolphins. Our plans have been pretty good, it’s just a matter of executing them,” De Villiers said.

While the Lions attack, spearheaded by Titans discard Hardus Viljoen, have bowled their opposition out in all four of their matches thus far, De Villiers said the Northerns/Easterns combination could also take wickets through exerting pressure.

“If you put batsmen under pressure and hit good areas, then you will get wickets. You don’t want to be trying for miracle balls, good balls in the right areas are the ones that end up taking wickets,” the former Free Stater said.

The Dolphins season may have already gone awry due to a combination of bad weather and poor form, but De Villiers said the Titans would still be keeping an eye on quality players like Vaughn van Jaarsveld, Jonathan Vandiar (if fit), Cody Chetty, David Miller and Lonwabo Tsotsobe.

THERE was a chance of playing lesser opposition elsewhere, but Titans coach Matthew Maynard said his team would not want their Champions League Twenty20 semifinal to be anywhere other than SuperSport Park on Friday, even if it was against the tournament favourites, the Sydney Sixers.

Maynard is banking on a full house to get behind his men and lift their performance against what he warned would be formidable opposition.

“Home-ground advantage is one thing, but if there’s a big crowd in then it will also be a massive boost for the team, like having a 12th or 13th man.

“They love playing in front of their fans at SuperSport Park and I hope there are 10,000 people here on Friday night in as much blue as possible.

“If it’s only half-full, then playing at home won’t be an advantage because there won’t be enough people to create that atmosphere,” Maynard said.

“But Sydney are one of the favourites to win the competition, we all know they are a very strong outfit and their bowlers are particularly suited to these conditions,” he said.

Star batsman AB de Villiers is not going to be playing for the Titans, despite hopes that his troublesome back had settled down enough for him to appear for the first time in the tournament, while brilliant all-rounder Shane Watson is not in the Sydney team because he is being rested by Cricket Australia ahead of the crunch Test series against South Africa.

Watson’s absence does rob the Sixers of a key bowler, but they can nevertheless field a top-class pace attack boasting Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, all of whom have played for Australia.

Watson’s departure has also left a big hole at the top of the batting order and Sydney do not have a particularly explosive line-up anymore, something that will please the Titans bowlers after they received a mauling at the hands of the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in their last outing. But as Maynard points out, that match against KKR was a dead rubber and the Indian Premier League team played with a freedom that would have been outrageous in a knockout game.

“The Knight Riders really went hard after our bowlers, they hit them off their lengths, but it was high risk, high reward cricket. They had nothing to lose and they could easily have been 60 for six instead. You can’t go on batting like that throughout a tournament, especially in a semifinal that has a lot riding on it,” Maynard said.

Apart from that last game, the Titans bowlers have played a big part in their qualification for the semifinals, and Maynard issued a warning to Sydney that the home bowlers would also be well suited to conditions at SuperSport Park.

“The bowling unit has been superb and it was just unfortunate that our two bankers (Ethy Mbhalati and Alfonso Thomas) went for big runs against KKR. But I’m more than happy with our bowling, they’ve been superb throughout the tournament and conditions will suit them as well,” Maynard said.

The Welshman said that even though he expected a good cricket wicket at SuperSport Park, the ability to build an innings would be crucial in the semifinal. “Slogging does not play a massive part in T20, full stop. Maybe at the end of the innings, but generally, good cricket shots are the ones that pay off. There’s an important role for a batsman with a strike rate of around 115 and then the others around him can score at 130+.”

Jacques Rudolph has already proven that, with Henry Davids and Farhaan Behardien providing the acceleration around him. The Titans will be hoping captain Martin van Jaarsveld and Protea prospect Heino Kuhn will also have their say now that the tournament has reached the crucial knockout stage.

http://www.bdlive.co.za/sport/cricket/2012/10/26/titans-banking-on-home-support-at-supersport-park

“The single most important thing to happen to cricket since unity,” was how the head of sponsorship at one of Cricket South Africa’s major backers described the election of five new independent board members to me.

But while the announcement that Absa’s Louis von Zeuner would chair the new CSA board, alongside four other independents and five elected members from the cricket fraternity, had me longing for the day when rugby and football would follow suit, the gravy-train brigade were already beginning the onslaught against progress.

Norman Arendse, the former CSA president, set the ball rolling with all manner of threats and allegations because the current board did not see fit to approve his appointment as recommended by the “Independent” Nominations Committee (INC).

The INC ignored the stipulation that the nominees could not have had any official involvement with cricket over the last three years, possibly because three of them are Western Province-based, where Arendse is an honorary life member.

They had no qualms about disqualifying SK Reddy, a wonderful servant of the game in KwaZulu-Natal, using the same technicality.

After being snubbed, Arendse used the race card, which is bizarre, because white voters are in the minority on the CSA board and the majority of the independent nominees are non-white. He then complained to the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc).

Sascoc, that bastion of squeaky-clean administration, will now be investigating whether CSA, by daring to move with the times and opt for professional, independent leadership, have broken Sascoc’s rules and done enough to be suspended. Because of this, the CSA AGM that was scheduled for Saturday and would have elected the remaining five, non-independent board members, has been postponed – and there is even the possibility that the Proteas will be stripped of their national team status.

The motives of Sascoc and their CEO, Tubby Reddy, are not clear; but they were firmly on the side of Gerald Majola during the bonus scandal investigation, with Reddy even suggesting to me that the forensic reports just needed “a bit of editing” and everything would be sorted out!

Sascoc are facing a lot of heat over the way they spend money, with the impression being that administrators are leeching off cash-strapped sports for their own benefit.

To not allow people like Arendse to run cricket is exactly the aim of the new independent board structure recommended by Judge Nicholson and implemented by CSA.

While Majola obviously used CSA as his own fiefdom in order to enrich himself financially, it is the hunger for power that characterises Arendse, and he would use the sport for those ends, as he did while he was president in 2007/8.

Arendse says he resigned as president, but that was in the face of an overwhelming vote of no confidence that was already on the table. And the board turned against him not because of any transformation issues, but because Arendse was power-hungry, was interfering in the selection of the national team and was bullying players via text messages.

When the advocate wanted Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher dropped from the team for the 2007 ICC World T20 tournament, it had nothing to do with transformation. Instead, it was just determined by his wishes, based on his own opinion of cricketing merit, never mind that selectors are appointed for that job.

Likewise, when Charl Langeveldt bravely turned down his selection to tour India instead of Andre Nel on the basis of colour, he was subjected to the most horrific bullying by Arendse.

I have had first-hand experience of Arendse’s venom. During his last days as president, he tracked down my e-mail address and sent me the following abuse on September 19, 2008:

“Your typically cowardly piece will impress very few readers. Most know you’re an excuse for a journalist, let alone [a] sports journalist.”

I look forward to further correspondence.

Since his departure from cricket, Arendse has not been wandering in the sporting wilderness. He tried to get into football administration, but was shown the door when he stepped on Irvin Khoza’s turf, and he has continued to play a Machiavellian role in the highly-politicised Western Province cricket circles.

People like Von Zeuner and the other independents – Wesizwe Platinum’s Dawn Mokhobo, Constitutional Court Trustee Vusi Pikoli, Old Mutual COO Mohamed Iqbal Khan and global business leader Geoff Whyte – have little to gain from cricket and much benefit to add through their exceptional skills.

Previous experience (especially the Majola saga) shows that people who are voted on to the board through cricket structures – the clubs and provinces – always owe somebody something and tend to make decisions for the good of their constituency, not the game as a whole.

The South African Rugby Union is finding it exceptionally hard to run the game as efficiently as possible in this country for the same reason: 14 board members all pulling in different directions to look after their own interests, as seen in the Lions/EP Kings fiasco.

The five non-independent board members will provide whatever cricket-specific knowledge is necessary, but they cannot dominate the more “common sense” input provided by the independents.

The words of Cricket Australia chairman Wally Edwards, ahead of their special general meeting on Thursday that elected a new, independent board, are food for thought for those who wish to get in the way of similar progress in South Africa.

“Australian cricket needs a governance that the modern sport deserves as a highly-professional, major player in the global sport and entertainment arena. But we are no longer a group of stand-alone states seeking to collectively organise international cricket matches – we are increasingly thinking and acting as one unified national sport facing increasing competition for the public’s attention and support,” Edwards said.

http://dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2012-10-26-cricket-sa-a-whole-new-meaning-to-not-above-board