Ken Borland

Wallie Coetsee enjoys walks on the Jeffreys Bay beach most mornings with his two daughters and a braai at night, and the relaxed lifestyle certainly seems to be rubbing off on his golf as the 42-year-old cruised into the lead midway through the lucrative Joburg Open at Royal Johannesburg and Kensington Golf Club on Friday.

Coetsee added a six-under-par 65 on the West Course to the brilliant 66 he shot on the East Course on the first day to go to 12-under-par and he will be chased on the weekend by three golfers on 11-under – Simon Dyson, Garth Mulroy and Tjaart van der Walt – as well as Niclas Fasth and Anthony Wall on 10-under and Kristoffer Broberg, Alexander Noren, Thomas Aiken and Stuart Manley on nine-under.

Coetsee was off to a fast start on Friday as he birdied the first three holes but, after 23 years on the Sunshine Tour, he knows that there will be times when a patient approach is best.

Another birdie on the par-four sixth was followed by a bogey on seven, and Coetsee then just sat tight through a run of seven successive pars.

“I was very patient and my game plan was just to leave the tough pins, go for the safer side. You can’t attack every flag, there’s going to be a time to go and a time to be safe. Patience is the key, you can’t force things, it will happen,” Coetsee said.

And when it did happen the reward was a spectacular eagle on the 489-metre par-five 15th, followed by a birdie on the par-four 17^th that gave Coetsee a one-stroke lead.

“I’d had very good up-and-downs on 13 and 14, and then on 15 I hit a very good drive and had 218 metres to the flag. I hit a four-iron pin-high, five or six metres from the hole and sank the putt,” Coetsee explained, before giving the credit for a calm approach on the golf course to a relaxed lifestyle off it.

“We don’t have a TV at home in Jeffrey’s Bay, we’d rather walk on the beach or ride our bikes and my recent form has everything to do with the lifestyle. We’re in bed by eight, we’re reading books, I’m up early either to walk on the beach at six with Zoe and Kelly before school or I can go and practice very early,” Coetsee said.

Dyson, a six-time European Tour winner and a former member of the world’s top 30, produced a top-class round of 67 on the tough East Course to climb the leaderboard into a share of second.

A return to the Srixon clubs Dyson used a couple of years ago is clearly paying off.

“I’m back to the clubs I used a couple of years ago. My swing was good and I was playing really nicely, but I just didn’t know how far the ball was going with my previous clubs. And it’s nice to be able to see the yellow Srixon ball the whole way in the flight and it obviously helps on the greens.

“I’m very pleased, I’ve had quite a few birdies on the first two days and that hasn’t happened for a while, so I’m looking forward to getting stuck in over the weekend,” Dyson said.

The saddest story of the day was the cruel fate that befell Nic Henning, whose course record equalling 62 on the first day not only gave him the lead but also seemed to have set up another veteran who has endured a grim few years for a decent payday.

Henning began the day well enough with a birdie on the East Course’s 472-metre par-five opening hole, but alas, it all fell apart thereafter.

The 45-year-old carded four successive bogeys from the fifth hole and in a trice he had crashed to six-under-par overall and was already flirting with the cut line as he reached the turn in 40.

He birdied the par-four 11^th, but then his ball was swallowed by the pond on the 13^th, leading to a double-bogey, and further dropped shots on the 16^th and 18^th condemned him to a 78 that saw the first-round leader miss the cut, on four-under, by one stroke.

The fact that the cut was so low, equalling the lows of 2011, 2012 and 2013, shows that most golfers feasted on a cooler day in Linksfield with very little wind.

Englishman Wall helped himself to an eagle on the first hole of the East Course and followed up with three more birdies before the turn. He dropped a shot on the par-four 10^th, but then further birdies on the 16^th and 18^th holes gave him a 66 that left him just two strokes behind Coetsee.

Van der Walt, another South African veteran, was also off to a fast start on the East Course with four birdies on the front nine, but the inward loop was a bit tougher and the 40-year-old carded two bogeys and a par. But his 69 was still good enough to leave him in a tie for second.

“It was one shot at a time, stereotypical golf, because you can’t get ahead of yourself on this course. It was a bit more difficult to read the greens today, it was a struggle to pick the lines. But I’m hitting the ball well enough,” Van der Walt said.

Mulroy followed the pattern of the other golfers on 11-under with three birdies on the front nine and then two birdies and a bogey returning to the clubhouse. The winner of the 2011 Alfred Dunhill Championship is clearly one of the main threats to Coetsee.

The defending champion, George Coetzee, is just four strokes off the lead after a 69 on the East Course left him on eight-under, while Richard Sterne, the 2008 and 2013 champion, is in the group on six-under.

Darren Clarke, the newly-announced European Ryder Cup captain, missed the cut after a 72 on Friday left him on one-over-par for the tournament.

There were contrasting fortunes for the two veterans who posted the best first round scores on the East and West courses of Royal Johannesburg and Kensington Golf Club on Friday as overnight leader Nic Henning found himself out in the cold again, while Wallie Coetsee was sitting pretty at the top of the leaderboard for the Joburg Open.

Henning, who opened the tournament with a course record equalling 62 on the West Course, started well enough on Friday with a birdie on the East Course’s 472-metre par-five opening hole. But a horrible slab of four consecutive bogeys from the fifth hole put him under pressure and, although he birdied the 11^th hole, a double-bogey at 13 derailed him once again and he finished with two more bogeys to shoot a 78 that left him way down the leaderboard.

So far down, in fact, that Henning (-3), the good news story of the first day, actually missed the cut, which was made on four-under-par, by one stroke.

While Henning sunk beneath the waves, Coetsee surfaced at the end of a cooler day in Linksfield with a one-shot lead as he backed up his brilliant first-round 66 on the East Course with a six-under-par 65 on the West Course to go to 12-under-par overall.

Beneath the 42-year-old South African on the leaderboard are three golfers on 11-under, compatriots Garth Mulroy and Tjaart van der Walt, and Englishman Simon Dyson, while Niclas Fasth and Anthony Wall are on 10-under.

Coetsee has been on tour since 1992 and, while he enjoys the quiet life in Jeffrey’s Bay, there is clearly still plenty of competitive fire burning in him as he started the year by getting an Asian Tour card through their gruelling qualifying school in Thailand.

The laidback winner of two Sunshine Tour events spends every evening after his round braaing and he says his relaxed approach helped him on Friday to not push too hard, especially during a run of seven successive pars that followed a bogey on the seventh hole.

“I was very patient and my game plan was just to leave the tough pins, go for the safer side. You can’t attack every flag, there’s a time to go and a time to be safe. Patience is the key, you can’t force things, it will happen,” Coetsee said.

“You live for the moment when you play well, and I must enjoy that, but I’m back to level-par tomorrow. I need to just stay in the present and tonight I’ll have another braai.”

The patient approach paid off for Coetsee when he eagled the par-five 15^th and then another birdie on the par-four 17^th gave him the lead.

“I’d had very good up-and-downs on 13 and 14, and then on 15 I hit a very good drive and had 218 metres to the flag. I hit a four-iron pin-high, five or six metres from the hole and sank the putt,” Coetsee explained.

Van der Walt is another old stager enjoying a wonderful tournament and he reached the turn on 12-under after picking up four birdies on the East Course, before running out of steam a bit on the back nine and settling for a 69.

Dyson also went to town on the front nine, with three successive birdies from the sixth hole setting him up for a 67.

Despite the mounting pressure on them, the Bulls will remain faithful to the same plan they used in the opening two weeks of Vodacom SuperRugby when they take on the Sharks in a crunch local derby at Loftus Versfeld on Saturday.

“We believe what we are doing is right, we’re just not executing it well enough. Everybody can see where our mistakes are and we know that we haven’t performed as well as we can, not up to our standards,” captain Pierre Spies said.

The Bulls were just centimetres away – Grant Hattingh’s ‘try’ being disallowed by the TMO – from actually beating the Hurricanes last weekend and Spies believes this shows how close they are to turning their season around after opening with two defeats.

“It’s a game of inches and we need to keep perspective – if Grant had cut his fingernails the night before then we would have won and we wouldn’t be having this discussion, wouldn’t be looking at everything we’ve done wrong.

“We just have to graft it out, gel together and really stand up as a unit. We need to start converting pressure into points,” Spies said.

But it’s not just the Bulls’ results that have been disappointing: Against both the Stormers and the Hurricanes there was just no spark, no intensity, and a similar flatness against the Sharks will cost them dearly.

The Sharks responded to their opening defeat against the Cheetahs with a highly-impressive bonus-point win in sodden conditions over the Lions, a commanding performance in the scrum laying the platform.

The scrum has been a key area of concern for the Bulls so far this season, and if they don’t sort it out today, then it will surely also cost them dearly.

If the Sharks get front-foot ball then they can either attack through the middle with mobile, powerful ball-carrying forwards like Pieter-Steph du Toit, Marcell Coetzee and Ryan Kankowski, or they have finishing quality out wide in a backline that was superbly marshalled by Pat Lambie and Cobus Reinach against the Lions, and features pace on the wings in Lwazi Mvovo and Odwa Ndungane.

The return of Kankowski will also help the production of quality ball off the back of the lineout and it is in the set-pieces where the Bulls will find themselves under intense pressure.

“Obviously the Sharks have a very good set-piece set-up, we know they have a quality base there. So we need to make sure we put them under pressure there and make sure it’s a good base for us,” Spies said.

Under the circumstances currently at Loftus Versfeld, the words “misplaced optimism” spring to mind, but if the Bulls can regain the passion and pride that they normally possess at home, then they might just be able to dig themselves out of the hole they are currently in.

Teams

Bulls: 15-Jesse Kriel, 14-Bjorn Basson, 13-JJ Engelbrecht, 12-Jan Serfontein, 11-Francois Hougaard, 10-Handrè Pollard, 9-Rudy Paige, 8-Pierre Spies, 7-Lappies Labuschagne, 6-Deon Stegmann, 5-Victor Matfield, 4-Jacques du Plessis, 3-Trevor Nyakane, 2-Adriaan Strauss, 1-Mornè Mellet. Replacements – 16-Callie Visagie, 17-Dean Greyling, 18-Marcel van der Merwe, 19-Grant Hattingh, 20-Hanro Liebenberg, 21-Tian Schoeman, 22-Travis Ismaiel, 23-Jurgen Visser.

Sharks: 15-SP Marais, 14-Odwa Ndungane, 13-Waylon Murray, 12-Andre Esterhuizen, 11-Lwazi Mvovo, 10-Pat Lambie, 9-Cobus Reinach, 8-Ryan Kankowski, 7-Renaldo Bothma, 6-Marcell Coetzee, 5-Pieter-Steph du Toit,
4-Lubabalo Mtyanda, 3-Jannie du Plessis, 2-Bismarck du Plessis, 1-Dale Chadwick. Replacements – 16-Kyle Cooper, 17-Thomas du Toit, 18-Lourens Adriaanse, 19-Marco Wentzel, 20-Jean Deysel, 21-Conrad Hoffmann, 22-Fred Zeilinga/Lionel Cronje, 23-Jack Wilson.

South African captains have generally been through the mill at World Cups – the deep pain of Graeme Smith in 2011, Shaun Pollock’s stunned expression in 2003, Hansie Cronje’s tears at Edgbaston in 1999 are all still vivid memories – so it was wonderful to see AB de Villiers enjoy a glorious day at the Sydney Cricket Ground yesterday.

Just five weeks after lashing 149 off 44 balls against the West Indies at the Wanderers – his 31-ball century being the fastest in ODI history – De Villiers made 162 not out off 66 deliveries to destroy the same side at another great cathedral of the game.

In the process, the South African captain reached 150 off a record 64 balls, and De Villiers now holds the records for the fastest 50, century and 150 in ODI history, sealing his status as one of the greatest batsmen to have ever played limited-overs cricket.

The Sydney Cricket Ground rose as one for De Villiers after one of the most scintillating displays of batting ever seen on the global stage, and the likeable 31-year-old now has a beautiful World Cup memory to cherish, replacing the nasty scenes of 2011 when New Zealand substitute Kyle Mills was shouting in his face after a mix up with Faf du Plessis accelerated a South African collapse.

In terms of batting excellence, De Villiers’ innings ticked all the boxes.

He came in under pressure with South Africa having lost both set batsmen, Hashim Amla and Du Plessis, for solid half-centuries in the space of three deliveries from Chris Gayle. De Villiers weathered that storm and was able to rotate the strike for the impressive Rilee Rossouw to capitalise on his own brisk start.

It was only once Rossouw had been dismissed – for a momentum-changing 61 off 39 balls – that De Villiers really took the game away from the West Indies.

There was tremendous skill, innovation, some brute force, wonderful placement and brilliant thinking in De Villiers’ innings. Probably the most impressive feature of his batting is the amount of time he has, even against the quick bowlers, to get any delivery away to the area he has pre-identified as a scoring region.

To say that De Villiers has a tremendous eye for the ball is a bit like saying Imran Tahir (South Africa’s best bowler in the tournament) likes to acknowledge taking a wicket with some sort of celebration; combine that with quick feet, lovely wrists, superb timing and placement, plus tactical nous, and bowling to AB becomes a nightmare for even the best bowlers.

For me, there are probably two more things I’d like to see AB de Villiers do.

One is obviously play the match-winning innings in the World Cup final.

For the other, I’m going to dig up the legend of Barry Richards, arguably the greatest South African batsman ever.

The destructive power of Graeme Pollock, the prolific elegance of Jacques Kallis and the silky skills of Hashim Amla all feature in that debate, but for sheer brilliance in being able to fashion any stroke for any ball, Richards and De Villiers probably come out tops.

In the days of Richards, there was no international cricket for South Africans and the club game was of a very high standard, with provincial players in action most of the time. The legend goes that Richards, bored of the humdrum challenges of plundering hundreds, sometimes used to make it more interesting by only using the side of the bat. And the pitches were generally quite juicy in Natal club cricket.

On one famous occasion at the Collegians Club in Pietermaritzburg, Richards used the side of the bat for an over bowled with the new ball by Pat Trimborn, who played four Tests for South Africa!

Given the extraordinary brilliance of De Villiers, perhaps he should take on the bowlers with only the side of the bat just to even the contest a bit!