Ken Borland

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.

The False Bay Coastal Park, in particular the Strandfontein Sewage Works, is a waterbird mecca and it provides just the right sort of habitat for one of my favourite birds – the Pied Avocet.

Having spent most of my life in KwaZulu-Natal and done most of my birding in lowveld areas, the Pied Avocet is not a run-of-the-mill sighting for me. As the name ‘Pied’ makes clear, this wader features just two colours – black and white – and yet the combination of them is so perfect, so crisply elegant and pleasing to the eye.

Added to this is the sight of their unusual bill – long, thin and upcurved – and their stately comportment, walking slowly through shallow water while swiping right … and left … with their scything bill to capture small crustaceans and insect larvae, which just makes them thoroughly interesting and pleasant to watch.

They have become particularly fond of artificial water bodies, especially saline or nutrient-rich ones. So sewage works have been a particular boon for this species.

And the Strandfontein Sewage Works, which are the central feature of the False Bay Coastal Park, situated between Muizenberg and Mitchell’s Plain, occasionally holds globally significant numbers of Pied Avocet – at times as many as 1% (550) of the African population, thereby qualifying as an Important Bird Area trigger species.

On this visit, on a lovely sunny evening in late March with a fresh breeze blowing, there were discrete handfuls of this nomad on the settling ponds.

With them were Blackwinged Stilts, also a member of the long-legged, long-billed Recurvirostridae family.

There are 20 different pans at Strandfontein, linked by a system of tracks which a normal sedan car can comfortably navigate, except sometimes for those next to Baden Powell Drive which runs right alongside False Bay and the ocean.

The pans have differing water-levels, some of them manually manipulated, which means they provide subtly different habitats – from reedbeds to large expanses of open water, both shallow and deep – and their different features range from artificial roosting platforms to well-vegetated edges, coastal dunes and sand islands.

This promotes a high diversity of species which is why 76 different waterbird and 18 coastal birds have been recorded at Strandfontein. And they are there in their numbers, making it a popular destination for large numbers of birders from all over the country. And every now and then a national rarity pops up; it really does feel like anything is possible on or above the pans or in the Cape Flats Dune Strandveld surrounding them.

My sightings at the end of summer were more mundane, but still enough to whet the appetite for future visits.

The near-endemic, plankton-loving Cape Shoveller can be uncommon elsewhere in South Africa, but is common in the sea-level freshwater wetlands around False Bay, and it was joined by other Anatids in Yellowbilled Duck, Cape Teal and Spurwinged Goose, while Kelp Gulls were common, flying over the coastal dunes and nearby dump site.

Lots of Hadeda and Sacred Ibis were along the fringes of the pans, along with Cattle Egret, Blacksmith Plover, Cape Wagtail and Grey Heron. Redknobbed Coots quietly munched on water weeds, Dabchicks appeared and then disappeared again as they dived underwater, and Whitebreasted Cormorants were standing around drying themselves before contemplating heading off to roost.

Cape Reed Warblers gave their rich, bubbly calls from inside the reedbeds, before one eventually came into view at the top of the stalks. European Swallows owned the skies above the pans.

The grassy areas where one enters the False Bay Coastal Park are also good for birding. A Jackal Buzzard was standing sentry at the entrance before patrolling for rodents in the verges of the tar road.

The road goes along the eastern end of Zeekoevlei, and has picnic sites underneath a row of Eucalyptus trees; a Pied Crow was flying around looking for scraps and even a Small Grey Mongoose came dashing from cover to see what morsels it could find.

The bushier areas mark the beginning of the Cape Flats Dune Strandveld, an endangered vegetation type unique to this area. It is prime habitat for the Cape Grassbird, an endemic skulker that is not often seen despite its long tail, but on this occasion I was sharp enough to be fortunate.

Karoo Prinia is another endemic and a habitat generalist as long as it has some shrubby thickets to dive into when disturbed, and it was spotted on one of the dune ridges close to the Grassbird.

A Blackshouldered Kite perched nearby and kept a beady red eye on proceedings.

Birders are well-advised to watch like a hawk in the False Bay Coastal Park because one will seldom be disappointed given the number of species that frequent this area. And there is always the possibility of spotting a rarity. That’s what I’ll be hoping for next time I’m there.

Sightings List

Jackal Buzzard

Small Grey Mongoose

Spurwinged Goose

Kelp Gull

Blackshouldered Kite

Cape Grassbird

Hadeda Ibis

Karoo Prinia

Pied Crow

Cattle Egret

Blacksmith Plover

Cape Teal

Yellowbilled Duck

Dabchick

Cape Shoveller

Sacred Ibis

European Swallow

Cape Wagtail

Whitebreasted Cormorant

Grey Heron

Pied Avocet

Blackwinged Stilt

Cape Reed Warbler

Redknobbed Coot

Graeme Smith, Mark Boucher and Enoch Nkwe are all in place for the next two years so the Proteas will at least enjoy some stability after the turmoil they have been through over the last couple of years, but there is still reason to fear that Cricket South Africa could still be captured.

Smith was on Friday confirmed as the full-time Director of Cricket through until April 2022, which should take care of all the on-field issues as he has already struck up a good working relationship with Proteas head coach Boucher and assistant Nkwe, as well as with the South African Cricketers Association and the players.

But it is in the boardroom, where all the vital decisions are made, where tremendous uncertainty still exists. Most notably because acting chief executive Jacques Faul is not a permanent appointment.

At the moment his contract runs through to June, and there have apparently been moves to give him a three-month extension. But the board, who appoint the CEO, have their hands tied legally because of the elephant still in the room – Thabang Moroe.

The former CEO was suspended on December 6 for misconduct and a permanent chief executive cannot be appointed until Moroe’s disciplinary process has been completed. The forensic audit that is so crucial to that process apparently only began a week or two before Lockdown i.e. in early March, four months after he was suspended!

The audit itself has been allocated three months so justice is most certainly going to be delayed for Mr Moroe. Not that he is probably too concerned because he is on full pay in the interim!

Given that the CSA board still comprises largely the same incompetents who firstly appointed Moroe and then enabled his malfeasance, plus the certainty that the former CEO knows exactly where the board members have buried their own skeletons, there is reasonable anxiety that Faul may yet be told “Thank you very much for fixing our mess” and shown the door.

There has also been talk among those who keep an eye on cricket politics that Moroe has offered to go, no-contest, if he is paid R25 million. If that happens it should really set the cat among the pigeons because it will be seen as rewarding poor governance, will surely further alienate the stakeholders Faul has worked so hard to woo back into the fold and will merely add to the money splurged on Moroe, who has shown an appetite for siphoning up gravy like an elephant with its trunk in a desert waterhole.

Not only is the concept of accountability totally foreign to the current CSA Board, but they are also operating with only eight of the prescribed 12 directors in place. After the spate of resignations at the end of 2019, only two independent directors (Professor Steve Cornelius and Marius Schoeman) remain, and of the six non-independents, five of them have been supporters of Moroe.

And the lead director, who needs to come from the independents, also has not been appointed for two years.

There was a time when Ghanaian-born Naasei Appiah was Moroe’s right-hand man at CSA, rising to the rank of chief operations manager. But Appiah was one of the staff suspended by Moroe last December before his own fall from grace. Appiah’s disciplinary process has also not yet been completed, with commercial manager Clive Eksteen also in the same state of limbo.

It seems Moroe’s other chief ally was company secretary and head of legal Welsh Gwaza. Things like disciplinary hearings and the appointment of new directors fall under his ambit.

So it is surely in the national interest for Gwaza to be asked “Why the delay”?

Unfortunately, CSA’s head of communication, Thami Mthembu, did not reply to a request on Friday to ease the perception many South African cricket fans have that certain people are being protected from accountability.

Graeme Smith is now the full-time Director of Cricket for Cricket South Africa for the next two years and one of the first decisions he announced after his permanent capacity was confirmed on Friday is that Quinton de Kock will not be the Proteas Test captain.

Wicketkeeper De Kock is currently South Africa’s captain for ODIs and T20 Internationals, as well as being a key batsman across all three formats. There are few other realistic contenders who are certain of their place in the five-day team. The Proteas are scheduled to play two Tests in the West Indies in July/August.

Smith, the Proteas’ record-breaking captain from 2003 to 2014, said there was the threat of burnout if De Kock was also made Test captain, as well as keeping wicket and being arguably their most important batsman. The 27-year-old De Kock has made it clear that he does not want to give up the gloves.

“There’s no one person right now that we are looking at but I can tell you that the Test captain is not going to be Quinton. So it will be who escalates themselves as a consistent performer, who steps forward and has the respect of the team. Quinton is our white-ball captain but he won’t be doing the job in Test cricket as well.

“We want to keep Quinton fresh and playing well, and to be the captain in all three formats is very challenging. It probably won’t work. Just in terms of workload and mental capacity, being captain in all three formats probably isn’t going to be beneficial. We also have to consider the style of personality and player that Quinton is, and keep him as free and fresh as possible,” Smith said on Friday.

CSA acting chief executive Jacques Faul on Friday hailed Smith for the top-class leadership skills he has shown as the director of cricket in an interim capacity and announced that he had now received a two-year contract.

“It gives me great pleasure to contract Graeme permanently through to March 31, 2022 and I thank him for the willingness he showed to come on board and all the hard work he has done so far. I’m not sure anyone’s administrative career has started off with so many challenges, but he has looked at cricket administration in a different way in a very difficult time.

“We wanted to appoint him permanently from the word go in December, but there was a lot of uncertainty and we both wanted to see if the partnership worked. It has definitely worked well and Graeme’s leadership is vital to us, we’re extremely happy with his performance and he has also played a big role in this Covid-19 crisis,” Faul said.

Smith said he had agreed to become Director of Cricket on a fulltime basis because he wanted to make a difference for the sport in South Africa and get the Proteas back to the top of the world game.

“I would be lying if I said there was 100% certainty when I took on the job because there was so much doubt on all fronts. But operationally I’ve now got to know the staff and there are a lot of hardworking people who are passionate about the game. I feel more invested now, I care about the national team and the business side more than I used to now as well.

“I want to get stuck in and make a difference. We need to make good, consistent decisions over a period of time when it comes to the Proteas and grow our pool of players. We need to maximise our strategies, although our financial position will play a role. The players feel a lot more settled now and we’re having good feedback and conversations with them,” Smith said.