Ken Borland

Darren Fichardt birdied the last hole for a six-under-par 64 and a one-stroke victory in the Betway Championship at Killarney Country Club on Friday and said he was grateful for the return of butterflies in the stomach after five months without any competitive golf.

Fichardt’s 64 was the lowest round of the tournament and saw him sign for a three-under-par total of 207, one ahead of fellow veteran Ulrich van den Berg, who himself had a birdie putt on 18 for the tie and a playoff, but it shaved the hole from 12 feet out.

The 45-year-old Fichardt holed out from eight feet on the last for his sixth birdie of the day and his 18^th Sunshine Tour title as the Betway Championship launched the new Rise Up Series that marks a return for professional golf.

“I’m very happy to win and it’s just awesome to have those competitive golf butterflies in the stomach again after five months on the couch. Going into the final round six shots behind it’s just a case of whatever happens, happens. It’s a case of all or nothing. My tee-shot on 18 was a bit short, so I had to keep my approach under the trees, it was a bit low, but it helped because with a high floater you never know how it’s going to bounce.

“At the start of the day I was missing short putts for birdie and getting frustrated. With the scoring system now after Lockdown you can see all the scores all the time and I saw how my good friend Jaco van Zyl was burning up the course with a 65. So I thought I better start getting some birdies and to get three straight around the turn was good because this is a tough course,” Fichardt said after claiming R95 100 for the win.

Overnight leader Alex Haindl fell down the final classification with a two-over-par 72, finishing in a tie for third. Two birdies on the front nine kept him neck-and-neck with Anton Haig, who eagled the fifth, but successive bogeys at the seventh and eighth saw Haindl slip and he came home in 37.

Haig collapsed on the back nine with five bogeys and a double-bogey on the par-three 17^th when he was short of the green, but struggled to get out of a grass bunker.

Jaco Prinsloo and Ruan Korb shared third place with Haindl on one-under-par. Prinsloo was in a share of the lead but bogeyed the last two holes.

Fichardt said it was a brutally tough return to action for the Sunshine Tour golfers, likening the course, which was dry with greens like ice-rinks, to a U.S. Open layout.

“It was frustrating because it’s a short track but the greens were tricky with the lines difficult to read and a lot of short putts missed. It was like playing in the U.S. Open. The first day was really cold and windy and I would have been happy with eight-over never mind three-over-par. The second round [70] was a bit better and then today was much better. “I realised today that you just have to get the ball into play here, you have to position yourself. It was definitely experience that carried me through today, after I was a bit more aggressive in the first two rounds,” Fichardt said.

Having attended a private school in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal, I’m as used to the accusations of my alma mater being stuck-up as I am to the reality that in national terms, we are pretty low down the pecking order in terms of schoolboy rugby.

Barring the odd golden periods, the private schools generally struggle to compete with the likes of your Grey College, Paul Roos, Paarl Gym, Affies and Paarl Boys’ High. But where their contribution is proportionally greater is in providing Black players for the pipeline.

And perhaps this is one of the key reasons a thriving schoolboy scene does not translate into greater success for our Junior Springboks side. There has been a lot of angst expressed in the last week over their performances on their tour of the United Kingdom – they were hammered by England and could only snatch a last-minute win over Wales.

The displays did not engender much confidence that South Africa can compete for the honours in the World Rugby U20 Championship that starts in Argentina early next month. It’s a tournament which the Junior Springboks have not won since 2012 and they have not appeared in the final since 2014.

It’s not as if they’re finishing at the bottom of the log either, though, with South Africa having finished third three times in the last four years and fourth once. But given the widely-held belief that we have the strongest schools rugby system in the world, there’s the lingering feeling that we should be doing better.

The problem is the advantages our schoolboy behemoths have in terms of strength, power and pace don’t last through into the senior ranks. Winning at all costs in the highly competitive schools scene means physical characteristics are relied upon and developed, to the detriment of skills. At senior professional level, everyone is pretty much on a par physically thanks to the scientific advances in conditioning, and South Africa loses its advantage.

This mentality also means South Africa’s great rugby schools have been ignoring their responsibility towards the pipeline of our rugby through their reluctance to embrace the need to develop more Black talent. It is time those top-10 schools become more transformed in their recruitment and in the teams they put out on to the field week in, week out.

Quotas or targets have been in place in our national teams for a long time now, and our top rugby schools really need to get with the program. That’s if they really have the national interest at heart and are truly preparing their pupils for the real South Africa outside their secluded cloisters.

Most of the Black players in the Junior Springboks system come from private schools, but I would love to see those great establishments mentioned above push more previously disadvantaged players through their outstanding rugby systems, which can only see better players being produced. I am pleased to hear that Grey College are planning big changes in this regard.

Quotas are obviously controversial and are not a perfect tool. Personally I don’t like them, but I liken them to elephant culling.

Elephants are my favourite animal and I cannot stand the thought of them being killed. But I also recognise the need for culling because if their populations in game reserves are left unchecked, elephants destroy their environment leading to the deaths of both themselves and many other creatures.

The fact that elephants are confined to game reserves is a man-made problem, therefore man has the responsibility to find a solution. Likewise, Apartheid was a man-made problem and quotas seem to be the best solution on the table right now to undo the damage.

Given how long we have waited for the Springboks to comprise just 50% players of colour, I shudder to think what would have happened if quotas were not in force.

https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-citizen-gauteng/20190504/282467120320394

The Cricket South Africa Board have brought in the services of a PR company to help polish their tarnished image, which is so bad at the moment that not even all the distractions of a racial witch-hunt have been able to disguise their complicity in the ugly shambles that the beloved game in this country has become.

Of course CSA have also engaged the services of a quarrel of lawyers to help them handle the numerous legal issues they are dealing with, the most recent of which is their failure to appear before parliament’s sports portfolio committee as scheduled on Friday.

The forensic report into the activities of suspended CEO Thabang Moroe and whether the Board itself is implicated in any misgovernance was bound to have been a hot topic in parliament on Friday, but CSA cried off and begged for a postponement because they said the report is not yet ready to be made public.

My legal friends tell me this is probably above board because if serious allegations are made by the report, it would need to be sent by CSA’s Audit and Risk Committee to lawyers in order to ensure due process is followed. But given that the report was finalised at the end of June, progress in this crucial matter has been glacial. Perhaps the sports ministry should apply some ‘global warming’ to the backsides of the recalcitrant administrators, whose behaviour is certainly indicative of people who have something to hide.

But more important than any PR company or even lawyers, CSA have to take notice of what their players are telling them. Their services are the very lifeblood of the game; without our top cricketers, the Proteas slide down the rankings, sponsors, crowds, viewers and broadcasters disappear, and the money dries up. Although that would surely chase away the self-serving vultures feeding on the game, it also creates a vicious circle because with less money, teams become less competitive and the cycle continues to spiral down into oblivion.

The current players, apart from showing their support for the heroic Lungi Ngidi and Black Lives Matter, have been largely quiet in terms of weighing in on all the issues that have been tearing cricket apart during Lockdown. Their union, the South African Cricketers’ Association, have quite rightly been taking up the cudgel and speaking on their behalf.

But the first few murmurings are starting to emerge of how desperately uncertain and unhappy the players are. There have been numerous reasons for top cricketers to leave this country for greener pastures over the last few years but the possibility of the entire professional game collapsing in this country could see the floodgates really open and get that vicious cycle spinning out of control.

While hearing those former players who are speaking out about previous discrimination and the pain it has caused is important and valuable, we have heard way too much from people who have either disgraced the game or who have based their accusations on factual inaccuracies.

I believe these charlatans have been pushed to the front of the choir to further the Cricket Capture agenda which has been in place ever since Moroe and his allies on the Board and in CSA management set it in motion.

Moroe’s temporary replacement, Jacques Faul, has now given up his efforts to clean up the game, forced out by a Board which actively worked against him. Director of Cricket Graeme Smith is clearly now the main target because there have been way too many spurious allegations made about his time as captain. Lest we forget, under his watch the Proteas became the best team in the world in all formats and were at their happiest in terms of unity and embracing diversity.

SACA are now coming under fire too and this fits in perfectly with Moroe’s agenda. The suspended CEO stated clearly his intention to destroy the power and influence the players’ union had in the game. He was trying to achieve this by causing racial divisions, having tried to engineer a split with all the Black African players leaving SACA. Sound familiar in terms of what is now happening?

Fortunately SACA have had a strong president and servant of the game in Omphile Ramela.

There is still hope for South African cricket. We still have incredible playing talent and there is so much love for the game in this country. South African sport has produced many tremendous administrators so they are out there.

But it is getting late. Short of doing what one provincial president recommended to me – “the CSA Board is now in such a bad place that in our culture we say you have to slaughter a goat to cleanse it” – one can only hope the CSA Members Council do the right thing at the AGM on September 5 and vote in people who are committed to saving the game, not parasitizing it.

Killarney Country Club once again put the Sunshine Tour’s top pros through the mill on Thursday, with only four golfers able to enjoy the comfort of being under par after the second round of the Betway Championship, the opening event of the Rise Up Series that marks the return to action after the Covid-19 Lockdown.

Top of the pile was Sunshine Tour veteran Alex Haindl, who shot a marvellous 67 on Thursday to go into the final round on three-under-par, one stroke ahead of another stalwart in Anton Haig. Two other very experienced campaigners in Ulrich van den Berg and Adilson da Silva are the other golfers under par, after they both finished on one-under after shooting 69s.

Although conditions were warmer and there was just a comfortable breeze blowing, the 103-man field once again struggled with the hard and fast greens, putting a premium on accuracy off the tee on the tight, tree-lined layout.

Haindl, rebuilding his career after a couple of back surgeries, was relieved to be playing well in his 20^th season on the Sunshine Tour.

“It’s just nice to be playing again, you don’t know where you game is when you’re just practising at home because you’re not under the gun and you can’t see where your game needs to be better. Since my last surgery last year it just felt like I couldn’t get going, I wasn’t moving the way I like, but today was a bit better. The game was a bit neater today, I kept it together better.

“My short game was a bit sharper today as I got more used to the dry fairways and firm greens. I was just trying to miss in the right places and made a couple of good saves. Luckily I wasn’t playing too early in the morning, although it was a bit windy. But as the weather heats up, the ball flies further almost immediately – it’s like one shot suddenly goes 6-7 metres further,” Haindl said after his round which included just a solitary dropped shot at the par-three 17^th.

The youngsters that are used to bombing the ball miles off the tee seem to be losing this particular arms race, given the veterans in the top four, but there are still some fresh faces very much in contention to claim the first Sunshine Tour title on offer since Lockdown.

Rookie Ruan Korb is just three strokes back on level-par, while former amateur sensation Jayden Schaper showed once again that he has the mettle, even though he is still in his teens, to mix it with the men as he lay in a threatening position just four strokes back after solid rounds of 73 and 68.

Keith Horne is with him on one-over-par and he clearly has all the weapons to win on Friday, having claimed nine Sunshine Tour titles. First-round leader Dylan Mostert slipped back into a tie for ninth after a 75 on Thursday, but he is just five shots adrift of the lead.

Haindl said patience and accuracy off the tee would be key attributes to win on Friday.

“The par-fives are quite important but it’s very difficult to stop your second shot on the green, so there are no gimmies. If you drive decently then you can have a lot of wedges coming in, so if you’re swinging okay then you can give yourself a few chances. But it’s very tough, you need to stay patient and accept the outcome if you’ve done your best, if you had a good yardage and a good swing.

“My game-plan was pretty decent, I kept it in play most of the time and gave myself chances. In order to win tomorrow, I just have to play better than the other guys!” Haindl said.