Ken Borland

There will be top-flight domestic rugby in South Africa this weekend as the Free State Cheetahs, looking to quickly get up to speed for the Currie Cup, will be taking on a Toyota Invitational XV in Bloemfontein on Saturday at 4pm.

The match will be the first the Cheetahs have played since March 28 when they hammered the Eastern Province Elephants 71-12 in the preparation series, having been excluded from the Rainbow Cup, which is on a bye week in South Africa. With the Currie Cup set to get underway on June 19, the Free Staters need some competitive action as they look to regain the trophy they won in 2019.

The Invitational XV will be made up of players who are on the fringes of their Rainbow Cup franchises and will be coached by Ricardo Loubscher and Daan Human, who are both part of the Springbok management.

“We’re excited because we haven’t played for two months and we’re really looking forward to getting rid of the rust. This is a very important match because we don’t play in the Rainbow Cup so we have to look after ourselves and make sure we get some quality opposition before the Currie Cup. You can train as much as you want, but on the field is where you see what’s working and what’s not.

“Our guys had two weeks off and we’ve trained for six weeks in the last two months. But they also need match-fitness and I don’t think the Lions and Bulls are going to lose too many players to the Boks, plus there are a lot of overseas players around, so the Currie Cup is going to be a very strong competition. But we have a lot of quality players too and it’s sad they did not get the chance to show that in the Rainbow Cup,” Cheetahs coach Hawies Fourie said on Monday.

Harold Verster, the managing director of the Cheetahs, said top-level rugby has been sorely missed in Bloemfontein, but he is confident it will return soon.

“We’ve been in the cold for a while, but now we can look forward to the Currie Cup, which will be played home and away, starting in June. We are still positive and looking forward and there are still one or two more games we are looking at. I’m very positive that the Cheetahs will be playing at a higher level, SA Rugby are working really hard on that process.

“In the meantime we’re trying to keep our heads up. We’ve been through difficult times before and we will get through this too. Participation in a new European competition has been pending for a couple of months now, Covid is causing problems with that though, and the decision has to go through the highest level of European rugby. But there are positive signs,” Verster said.

Louis Oosthuizen joined the club when it came to South African golfers beaten into second place by Phil Mickelson at a Major championship when the American became the oldest ever golfer to win one of the sport’s four main tournaments with his two-stroke victory in the PGA Championship overnight at Kiawah Island’s Ocean Course.

If it wasn’t bad enough having Tiger Woods hogging most of the Majors in the 2000s, winning 12 of them including beating Ernie Els into second place in both the U.S. Open and the Open Championship in 2000, and winning the 2002 Masters by three strokes over Retief Goosen, Mickelson then beat Els by one stroke in the 2004 Masters and Tim Clark by two strokes at Augusta in 2006.

Oosthuizen was just marginally off his game in the final round of the PGA Championship, while his putter remained his most unresponsive club as he posted a one-over-par 73 in the final round to finish tied-second with American multiple Major winner Brooks Koepka. They each earned $1.05 million dollars.

While Mickelson is celebrating his own place in the annals of history as the oldest ever Major winner, Oosthuizen will be mulling over his fifth runners-up finish in the big four tournaments, having claimed the title in the 2010 Open Championship. But the 38-year-old can take some heart from the fact that Mickelson, who turns 51 on June 16, has finished second 11 times in Majors. But the left-hander has also won six Majors – the PGA twice, the Masters three times and the Open Championship once.

“I feel like I’m playing my heart out to get a second major, and I do know I have the game to do it. This was close. My game wasn’t great on the weekend, but it was better today than yesterday. So I just need to work harder on it to get myself in contention again,” Oosthuizen said after his round.

What shaped up as being a famous day in South African golf history, with three golfers in the top six going into the final round, ended as a disappointment, with only Oosthuizen challenging before once again finishing second-best.

Christiaan Bezuidenhout shot a 77 to slip into a tie for 30^th, while Branden Grace was in a tie for 38^th a shot back after a 78.

Danie van Tonder, in his debut Major appearance, shot 73 in the final round to finish tied-44^th, one shot ahead of Rory McIlroy.

Dean Burmester finished tied-59^th and Garrick Higgo, also on Major debut, shot an excellent 69 in the final round to climb to a tie for 64^th.

Travelling to the inner city of Johannesburg to play at Ellis Park has never been easy for any visiting team, whether international or domestic, and Bulls coach Jake White was certainly not shocked when his team were upset 34-33 by the Lions in their Rainbow Cup match there at the weekend.

While the Lions were winless and at the bottom of the log, they had been extremely competitive and could easily have won a couple of games already before they hosted the Bulls. It was a potential banana peel and White was wary, with good cause as the Lions rode a superb scrummaging display and the Bulls’ own mistakes to inflict the first loss on the Currie Cup champions since March 26.

“The Lions are always difficult to play against and they had a really good scrum today. It’s not something we can’t fix and we’re learning as coaches as well, what resources we have. But you don’t know how they are going to react under pressure unless they are put in those situations. When you’re winning, you take the good; now we have to take this knock on the chin and learn from it.

“Playing under pressure is the only way you learn how to handle it and we were able to see certain players under pressure today. A lot of our youngsters were under that pressure for the first time and some of the decision-making was a bit wrong. Full credit to the Lions, but it’s not as if we need to reassess everything, this is an opportunity for the team to grow,” White said.

The Bulls actually played well to take a 33-20 lead but then fell asleep and made a host of costly errors.

“We were leading 33-20 with 15 minutes left but then shot ourselves in the foot by things like dropping kick-offs and not finding touch, and then there were the scrums as well. If you can’t get your set-piece right then every penalty just puts you under more pressure. I have to stress how small the margins are in this competition and you can’t afford to drop your guard.

“Although the Lions played really well, we probably lost the game because at 33-20 we did enough to win it. We scored five tries so our attack was not too bad and Nollis Marais has worked really hard on our breakdown work, which has become a point of difference for us. You don’t have to say much about Johan Grobbelaar, Duane Vermeulen and Marco van Staden, but a lot of other guys are also making the right decisions at the rucks,” White said.

When Sharks coach Sean Everitt loans out most of his starting line-up to the Springboks this week, it will give him the chance to work with the players who are likely to play for the bulk of the rest of the year and fix the problems that were evident in their weekend loss to the Stormers.

This is a bye week for the South African teams in the Rainbow Cup and the Springboks will be holding an alignment camp. Then the stars will return for the last two weeks of the competition and what has now become a three-horse race for a place in the June 19 final against the European winners, following the Sharks’ weekend loss to the Stormers and the Lions upstaging the log-leading Bulls.

“Playing local derbies four weeks in a row has been really tough and it takes a toll physically. The guys deserve some rest and we’ll now have a week to work hard on the larger squad, get them ready for the Currie Cup. It’s a good opportunity for me to work closely with them, make sure they are ready to rock ‘n roll.

“Losing two in a row won’t give me sleepless nights, but I’ll be pondering how to fix the problems. And I’m not worried because the problems are fixable; if there was a lack of effort, enthusiasm or energy then we would be in trouble, but you can’t question the effort of the team, they worked hard and gave everything against a very powerful Stormers pack,” Everitt said after their 22-25 defeat at Kings Park.

The Sharks intimated that they would rather have taken on the Stormers with the sun out, instead of the overcast, wet weather which forced them into an arm-wrestle against one of the better packs in the competition.

“The Stormers always try to slow us down, we scored tries from quick lineouts and quick taps in Cape Town, that’s a part of our game and we got reward for that in our last match against them. We want to play a fast tempo of rugby but it was difficult in these conditions, especially late in the second half, when it rained quite hard. We had dominance for the first 30 minutes and for patches in the second half.

“But the lineout is a massive source of possession and a big contributor to the number of tries you score. We did really well in the first half, but we were under the pump in the second half, the Stormers have three really good jumpers, some really tall timber. So there’s a lot of hard work ahead on that, that’s the main area that let us down, while we also had lapses in defence,” Everitt said.