Ken Borland

For the first time in nearly 25 years, a matchplay tournament will feature on the Sunshine Tour programme when the South African Matchplay Championship is held at Zwartkop Country Club from Tuesday to Sunday.

Zwartkop is a short, 6442-metre course in Centurion that is ideally suited to matchplay golf and hosted a famous exhibition match in 1966 between Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus.

As Dale Hayes, the popular Yogi-Bear like figure synonymous with South African golf and the owner/director of Zwartkop, points out, the course may not be long, but the Hennops River winding through it presents a good mental challenge, especially for matchplay. Several of the smallish greens are fringed by the river, meaning shots that are either too short or too long are in danger of a watery grave.

“Top-class golfers hit the ball so far these days that Zwartkop is not long enough to be a great test of strokeplay golf. But when Handa [the sponsors] contacted me about hosting an event and they asked what format we should have, I straight away said matchplay.

“Because of the river, there’s water on 10 of the holes, with seven of those coming into play for the pros. So there’s a lot of risk or reward involved and a golfer needs to decide if he’s going to be aggressive or not. If he’s standing over a shot and is first to go, he’s got to decide whether to have a go or play it safe.

“You need a lot of thinking around this golf course, you can’t just step up and smash driver. Every shot requires a lot of thought and if you get too clever, then the water will be waiting for you,” Hayes said.

While this weekend’s HSBC Champions in China will obviously attract the biggest names in South African golf, Hayes says he is still “very pleased” with the quality of the field.

Jbe Kruger, the diminutive golfer with the heart of a Staffie who is third on the Asian Tour Order of Merit, will headline the 128-man field and can expect a stiff challenge from the likes of reigning SA Open champion Hennie Otto, former champion James Kingston, veteran Des Terblanche and three-time European Tour winner Darren Fichardt.

Hayes is expecting a highly-entertaining show from these top golfers.

“Matchplay is the most popular form of golf, it’s what you play against your buddies. Spectators can come and see some special golf, the golfers will be aggressive and will go for it and there should be lots of birdies and eagles, which you don’t see in strokeplay,” Hayes said.

The prize pool is R2 million and the winner will walk away with R300 000 as well as valuable Order of Merit points, while even first-round losers take away R4 700 from the event.

The support from the sponsor’s founder, Dr Haruhisa Handa’s ISPS – the International Sports Promotion Society – means there will also be a disabled component to the tournament.

Sixteen disabled golfers, including some from the On Course Foundation which gives seriously injured members of the British Armed Forces the opportunity to play golf, will play in their own concurrent tournament.

While the Sharks may be overwhelming favourites for Saturday’s Currie Cup final against Western Province in Durban, the memory of silly lapses that have cost them past finals in similar positions at the same venue will still be on the minds of the KwaZulu-Natal faithful.

The most famous of those was in the 2007 Super Rugby final against the Bulls, when a repeated failure to kick the ball out and a defence that was caught flatfooted allowed Bryan Habana to score one of his most celebrated tries and bring the Sanzar trophy to Pretoria for the first time. The deafening silence at King’s Park after victory was snatched from the Sharks at the death was something for the ears to behold.

Western Province will be hoping for similar magic from Habana on Saturday, as well as that other marvellous game-breaker Gio Aplon, while coach Allister Coetzee has also gambled by choosing the penetrative Damian de Allende alongside Juan de Jongh for his first Currie Cup start.

With the Sharks undoubted favourites on paper – Coetzee has had to call up six players from the U21s to cover for injuries – Western Province will almost certainly be trusting in their celebrated defence to ensure the Natalians do not get too far away from them, and then try to strike in the final quarter as they did against the Lions in the semi-final.

While many are predicting the star-studded Sharks squad, with a dozen Springboks, will simply swat Western Province aside, finals are not often like that and expected rainy weather in Durban may also be a leveller.

The visitors, denied a major cup for 11 years, are certainly going to be up for the game and nothing fuels motivation quite like being written-off as no-hopers.

But common sense suggests the Sharks should have too much power, skill and experience and only mental errors can deny them their seventh Currie Cup title.

Up front, Western Province have two animals (in an entirely complimentary sense) in Eben Etzebeth and Duane Vermeulen, but for the rest, the Sharks should have the edge in the forwards.

The Sharks’ Beast Mtawarira and Jannie du Plessis anchor the Springbok scrum, while the loose trio have all played for South Africa this year. Willem Alberts is the type of hard man who sends players to hospital, Marcell Coetzee is everywhere on the field at once and Keegan Daniel has the uncanny ability to pop up exactly where needed at the right time, as well as being a pinpoint link with his backs.

The second row is an area where Western Province may enjoy more parity, although Steven Sykes has functioned at a high level for several years for the Sharks and Anton Bresler is increasingly coming into his own as well.

Sharks half-backs Cobus Reinach and Pat Lambie may be small, but they can cause as much damage as those little Gremlins in the famous 1984 horror comedy film. Lambie, in particular, is a very clever player, using his boot well but also having sleight of hand and deceptive ability running with the ball.

He will be the home side’s general on Saturday and was instrumental in the Sharks’ 2010 Currie Cup triumph, scoring 25 points, including two tries, against the same opposition. It was probably the most complete performance by a fly-half in a Currie Cup final since Naas Botha’s heyday.

The rest of the backlines are fairly evenly matched, but Coach Coetzee was revealing his knowledge that Western Province will need something special to win the final by choosing De Allende, who was impressive at the end of the semi-final, instead of Marcel Brache, who was one of their stars through the Currie Cup campaign.

The entire Sharks back three of JP Pietersen, Lwazi Mvovo and Louis Ludik deserve to be part of Springbok coach Heyneke Meyer’s end-of-year touring squad and their ability to both dictate with the boot as well as counter-attack is an obvious strength.

In fact, the Sharks as a whole are the one team who seem to have perfected the art of mixing a territory-based game with one that demands a greater proportion of possession being kept in hand.

The all-round skills of the Sharks team, including the forwards, are also a notch above the rest of the teams in the Currie Cup.

The final might have come a year or two too early for what is undoubtedly a highly promising Western Province team, but on the day, with the pressure of finals rugby and the expectation of the crowd, the Sharks might, just maybe, toss it away. Especially if Western Province can summon the same sheer bloody-minded refusal to lose they showed in the semi-final against the Lions and earlier this year, as the Stormers, in the Super Rugby match against the Bulls at Loftus Versfeld.

The smart money is surely, however, on the Sharks having the skills to turn the same amount of dominance as the Lions and Bulls enjoyed into the points that will clinch the oldest trophy in provincial rugby anywhere in the world.

http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-10-27-shark-attack-currie-cup-preview

THERE was a chance of playing lesser opposition elsewhere, but Titans coach Matthew Maynard said his team would not want their Champions League Twenty20 semifinal to be anywhere other than SuperSport Park on Friday, even if it was against the tournament favourites, the Sydney Sixers.

Maynard is banking on a full house to get behind his men and lift their performance against what he warned would be formidable opposition.

“Home-ground advantage is one thing, but if there’s a big crowd in then it will also be a massive boost for the team, like having a 12th or 13th man.

“They love playing in front of their fans at SuperSport Park and I hope there are 10,000 people here on Friday night in as much blue as possible.

“If it’s only half-full, then playing at home won’t be an advantage because there won’t be enough people to create that atmosphere,” Maynard said.

“But Sydney are one of the favourites to win the competition, we all know they are a very strong outfit and their bowlers are particularly suited to these conditions,” he said.

Star batsman AB de Villiers is not going to be playing for the Titans, despite hopes that his troublesome back had settled down enough for him to appear for the first time in the tournament, while brilliant all-rounder Shane Watson is not in the Sydney team because he is being rested by Cricket Australia ahead of the crunch Test series against South Africa.

Watson’s absence does rob the Sixers of a key bowler, but they can nevertheless field a top-class pace attack boasting Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, all of whom have played for Australia.

Watson’s departure has also left a big hole at the top of the batting order and Sydney do not have a particularly explosive line-up anymore, something that will please the Titans bowlers after they received a mauling at the hands of the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in their last outing. But as Maynard points out, that match against KKR was a dead rubber and the Indian Premier League team played with a freedom that would have been outrageous in a knockout game.

“The Knight Riders really went hard after our bowlers, they hit them off their lengths, but it was high risk, high reward cricket. They had nothing to lose and they could easily have been 60 for six instead. You can’t go on batting like that throughout a tournament, especially in a semifinal that has a lot riding on it,” Maynard said.

Apart from that last game, the Titans bowlers have played a big part in their qualification for the semifinals, and Maynard issued a warning to Sydney that the home bowlers would also be well suited to conditions at SuperSport Park.

“The bowling unit has been superb and it was just unfortunate that our two bankers (Ethy Mbhalati and Alfonso Thomas) went for big runs against KKR. But I’m more than happy with our bowling, they’ve been superb throughout the tournament and conditions will suit them as well,” Maynard said.

The Welshman said that even though he expected a good cricket wicket at SuperSport Park, the ability to build an innings would be crucial in the semifinal. “Slogging does not play a massive part in T20, full stop. Maybe at the end of the innings, but generally, good cricket shots are the ones that pay off. There’s an important role for a batsman with a strike rate of around 115 and then the others around him can score at 130+.”

Jacques Rudolph has already proven that, with Henry Davids and Farhaan Behardien providing the acceleration around him. The Titans will be hoping captain Martin van Jaarsveld and Protea prospect Heino Kuhn will also have their say now that the tournament has reached the crucial knockout stage.

http://www.bdlive.co.za/sport/cricket/2012/10/26/titans-banking-on-home-support-at-supersport-park

“The single most important thing to happen to cricket since unity,” was how the head of sponsorship at one of Cricket South Africa’s major backers described the election of five new independent board members to me.

But while the announcement that Absa’s Louis von Zeuner would chair the new CSA board, alongside four other independents and five elected members from the cricket fraternity, had me longing for the day when rugby and football would follow suit, the gravy-train brigade were already beginning the onslaught against progress.

Norman Arendse, the former CSA president, set the ball rolling with all manner of threats and allegations because the current board did not see fit to approve his appointment as recommended by the “Independent” Nominations Committee (INC).

The INC ignored the stipulation that the nominees could not have had any official involvement with cricket over the last three years, possibly because three of them are Western Province-based, where Arendse is an honorary life member.

They had no qualms about disqualifying SK Reddy, a wonderful servant of the game in KwaZulu-Natal, using the same technicality.

After being snubbed, Arendse used the race card, which is bizarre, because white voters are in the minority on the CSA board and the majority of the independent nominees are non-white. He then complained to the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc).

Sascoc, that bastion of squeaky-clean administration, will now be investigating whether CSA, by daring to move with the times and opt for professional, independent leadership, have broken Sascoc’s rules and done enough to be suspended. Because of this, the CSA AGM that was scheduled for Saturday and would have elected the remaining five, non-independent board members, has been postponed – and there is even the possibility that the Proteas will be stripped of their national team status.

The motives of Sascoc and their CEO, Tubby Reddy, are not clear; but they were firmly on the side of Gerald Majola during the bonus scandal investigation, with Reddy even suggesting to me that the forensic reports just needed “a bit of editing” and everything would be sorted out!

Sascoc are facing a lot of heat over the way they spend money, with the impression being that administrators are leeching off cash-strapped sports for their own benefit.

To not allow people like Arendse to run cricket is exactly the aim of the new independent board structure recommended by Judge Nicholson and implemented by CSA.

While Majola obviously used CSA as his own fiefdom in order to enrich himself financially, it is the hunger for power that characterises Arendse, and he would use the sport for those ends, as he did while he was president in 2007/8.

Arendse says he resigned as president, but that was in the face of an overwhelming vote of no confidence that was already on the table. And the board turned against him not because of any transformation issues, but because Arendse was power-hungry, was interfering in the selection of the national team and was bullying players via text messages.

When the advocate wanted Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher dropped from the team for the 2007 ICC World T20 tournament, it had nothing to do with transformation. Instead, it was just determined by his wishes, based on his own opinion of cricketing merit, never mind that selectors are appointed for that job.

Likewise, when Charl Langeveldt bravely turned down his selection to tour India instead of Andre Nel on the basis of colour, he was subjected to the most horrific bullying by Arendse.

I have had first-hand experience of Arendse’s venom. During his last days as president, he tracked down my e-mail address and sent me the following abuse on September 19, 2008:

“Your typically cowardly piece will impress very few readers. Most know you’re an excuse for a journalist, let alone [a] sports journalist.”

I look forward to further correspondence.

Since his departure from cricket, Arendse has not been wandering in the sporting wilderness. He tried to get into football administration, but was shown the door when he stepped on Irvin Khoza’s turf, and he has continued to play a Machiavellian role in the highly-politicised Western Province cricket circles.

People like Von Zeuner and the other independents – Wesizwe Platinum’s Dawn Mokhobo, Constitutional Court Trustee Vusi Pikoli, Old Mutual COO Mohamed Iqbal Khan and global business leader Geoff Whyte – have little to gain from cricket and much benefit to add through their exceptional skills.

Previous experience (especially the Majola saga) shows that people who are voted on to the board through cricket structures – the clubs and provinces – always owe somebody something and tend to make decisions for the good of their constituency, not the game as a whole.

The South African Rugby Union is finding it exceptionally hard to run the game as efficiently as possible in this country for the same reason: 14 board members all pulling in different directions to look after their own interests, as seen in the Lions/EP Kings fiasco.

The five non-independent board members will provide whatever cricket-specific knowledge is necessary, but they cannot dominate the more “common sense” input provided by the independents.

The words of Cricket Australia chairman Wally Edwards, ahead of their special general meeting on Thursday that elected a new, independent board, are food for thought for those who wish to get in the way of similar progress in South Africa.

“Australian cricket needs a governance that the modern sport deserves as a highly-professional, major player in the global sport and entertainment arena. But we are no longer a group of stand-alone states seeking to collectively organise international cricket matches – we are increasingly thinking and acting as one unified national sport facing increasing competition for the public’s attention and support,” Edwards said.

http://dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2012-10-26-cricket-sa-a-whole-new-meaning-to-not-above-board