Ken Borland

Women’s Proteas coach Hilton Moreeng on Wednesday described their upcoming tour of the West Indies, in which they will play three ODIs and five T20 internationals from September 16 to October 6, as being vital on two fronts.

The ODIs form part of the ICC Women’s Championship, in which South Africa are currently languishing in seventh place, but if they win the series then they will overtake the fifth-placed West Indies, with the top four teams automatically qualifying for the 2021 World Cup.

But while that is South Africa’s priority, they would be stupid not to take advantage of being in the Caribbean just a couple of months before the next T20 World Cup, and the Proteas will get in some invaluable reconnaissance during that five-match series against the defending champions.

“The importance of the tour is two-fold, firstly the three ODIs are key because of the ICC Women’s Championship and they give us the opportunity for some points because we have some home series after that. Our priority is the ODIs, but we are very fortunate to play the T20s against the defending champions on their home soil as well.

“We will be able to see the conditions over there, we know the West Indies play very aggressive cricket and they obviously know the conditions very well, so we can see how we go against them, having beaten them here in the T20 series in 2016. So we will take as much as we can from being exposed to the conditions over there,” Moreeng said at the Tuks Cricket Oval, where the team is preparing at the High Performance Centre.

The Women’s Proteas disappointed in their tour of England in June, making silly mistakes, and the drive for consistency is the major focus of their preparations.

“Our consistency is the biggest thing we need to improve, we were extremely inconsistent in England. The skills were not where they should be, both in terms of the batting and the bowling. The fitness and fielding have been very good on the first two days of our camp and I’m very happy with how the youngsters are keeping up.

“We will now be going into the different scenarios we want to train for and the three practice games we’ll play will make sure the players all understand what is required. The experience around the young players will help them grow, we’ve been keeping tabs on how the new faces go about their business at the High Performance Centre and they have graduated very well,” Moreeng said.

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As we have seen so often in rugby, making changes to long-standing rules of the game almost invariably brings unexpected consequences and there has been a lot of talk recently about doing away with one of cricket’s most famous traditions, a move which I believe will boomerang badly on the sport.

South African captain Faf du Plessis was the latest to bring up doing away with the toss, although his beliefs lost some credibility because they came straight after the Proteas had been mauled in their two Tests in Sri Lanka.

Various high-profile Australians have also backed the ending of the toss, but again, these comments were mostly made after they had lost the Ashes in England.

Proponents of the eradication of the toss propose that the visiting team just gets to choose whether they want to bat or bowl, thereby supposedly removing home advantage, which the anti-toss advocates say has become a major problem in world cricket.

Happily, a couple of months ago the ICC Cricket Committee discussed doing away with the toss and decided that it was an integral part of the game and should be spared.

No doubt they had a better grasp of the actual facts surrounding the issue. Home ground advantage has always played a role in cricket, as it does in just about every sport, but winning or losing the toss actually does not have a major effect.

In this decade, the team winning the toss still only wins 43.78% of Test matches, so it is not a massive advantage. There is a slight benefit because only 35.13% of teams that lose the toss go on to win the match. Historically, Australia are the only side that wins more than 50% of the Tests in which they have won the toss, and even then it’s just 50.49%, only slightly higher than their overall success rate of 47.16%.

I believe giving the visiting team total control over what they do first would have a major bearing on the game, which is where the unintended consequences come in, especially in countries like India or New Zealand.

It’s fair to say the weather is out of the control of the people who prepare the pitches in those countries and they can only do so much to negate the effect of overhead conditions. Doing away with the toss would grossly undermine teams like India and New Zealand – in the heat of the sub-continent, dry, dusty, deteriorating pitches are almost inevitable and India would be batting second every time; conversely, New Zealand is usually pretty damp and overcast and the Black Caps would find themselves sent in to bat every time.

It would happen often in England as well that the home team would automatically have to bat at the most difficult time and it could also affect the Proteas at home.

What it boils down to is the ICC actually using the mechanisms they already have in place to ensure fair conditions – they already have rules in the playing conditions when it comes to unfair pitches and they just need to enforce them more diligently, especially when it comes to the sub-continent and even some South African green mambas.

The perception that away teams are struggling does have some basis in fact. In this decade, the visiting team has lost 51.75% of Tests, up from 46.40% in the 2000s. It is interesting, though, that the away team has been winning Tests in the last 20 years at pretty much the same rate as they have been doing through the history of the game.

It is, of course, the number of away draws that has dropped significantly in recent times; down from 47.31% of Tests in the 1960s to just 20.76% in this decade. That is obviously a positive but it also points to the rise of T20 cricket and batsmen being able to hit the ball but not defend against the turning, seaming or swinging delivery.

The problem is not the toss, it’s modern-day batsmen being ill-prepared for foreign conditions, and sometimes the ICC allows the home union to get away with cheap shots in terms of pitch preparation.

All roads will lead to Pretoria for the country’s leading schoolboy cricketers over the September 21-24 long weekend with the launch of the North-South T20 Competition organised by the Waterkloof, Menlopark and Centurion high schools.

Sixteen of South Africa’s top school cricket teams have been invited – the three hosts and Nelspruit High School, four Cape schools, four from the northern regions and four from the coastal areas. They have been divided into four groups, comprising one team from each of the categories, with the top two in each pool going into the quarterfinals and semi-finals on Sunday, September 23, followed by the finals on the Monday, 24^th.

The grand final will be played at Tuks Cricket Oval and the schools will be competing for prizemoney of R100 000, R50 000 going to the winners, R25 000 to the other finalist, R15 000 for third place and R10 000 for the winners of the Plate competition, which has been included to ensure teams play cricket right through to the Monday.

Waterkloof are in Group A and will be joined by Bishops from Cape Town, Bloemfontein powerhouses Grey College and KwaZulu-Natal’s Westville High. Group B features Nelspruit, Paarl Gim, Rustenburg and Glenwood; Centurion host Group C with SACS, Potch Volkskool and Northwood taking them on, while Group D will be contested by hosts Menlopark and visitors Wynberg BHS, NoordKaap and St Andrew’s all the way from Grahamstown.

Leading umpire Johan Cloete is one of the founders of the tournament and is serving as the inaugural chairman.

“We want to have national status in the near future, we want to make it the most successful schools competition. The teams, with more than 200 boys participating, will all be based at Camp Discovery, where there are fields to practise and they can interact afterwards, while PitchVision will live-stream two games a day. The fact we have AB de Villiers as the ambassador for the tournament speaks volumes for how far we want to go.

“For the duration of the tournament, sponsors WeBuyCars.co.za are offering discounts of between two to eight thousand rand for all parents, players, organisers or coaches, while we have also had great support from the Atterbury Trust, WAD Holdings, Glenfair Boulevard, Puma and IXU,” Cloete said.

In the previous decade, when the Nedbank Golf Challenge was held in December and was able to attract top-10 players, Sun City was famous for the congestion that would occur throughout the resort as corporate South Africa and students would come flocking for their annual end-of-year party.

Crowds have dwindled since those days, as both the sport and the economy have changed, but last year’s Nedbank Golf Challenge was noticeable for the upturn in crowd figures and just a busier feel around the resort and on the fairways scattered amongst the ancient volcanic craters of the Pilanesberg.

A major reason for that was the focus Sun International and their hospitality partners Circa put on making the whole NGC experience more spectator-friendly and not just an event catering for the corporates safely secluded away in their air-conditioned marquees. And, given the success of 2017, they are going to drive for even bigger crowd numbers for this year’s tournament from November 8-11.

“The move from December, when it was the year-end function for most spectators, to November meant we had to worry about losing the public, especially the scholars and those writing matric exams, and we lost a lot of the day visitors we traditionally had. So we’ve been trying to make sure we bring those crowds back and the crowds are getting back to the way we begun with, with more than 65 000 people coming to Sun City.

“So this year we’re making even more space for the public, without changing things for the corporates. We’re opening up a huge amount more space on 18 with a three-tier structure that has a lot more ground-level space and will provide great public viewing. The entertainment area was one of the highlights of last year’s tournament, we want to capitalise on that and its times will be extended for a lot longer. Circa are running the public areas and are bringing in a lot of variety,” Eugene Boniface, the group manager for content at Sun International, said.

Workmen have been on-site since April, with 14 600 square-metres of infrastructure being set up, and 1300 tonnes of scaffolding, with Circa promising a real amphitheatre around the 18^th green. Apart from the focus on making the Nedbank Golf Challenge more crowd-friendly, work has also been going on on the course.

The 17^th tee has been moved around to add 30-odd metres to the tee-shot and make it more difficult, while the bunkers have undergone massive change with grass now on the faces rather than sand, to make it more playable for the golfers after there were complaints.