Ken Borland

ST FRANCIS BAY, Eastern Cape – George Coetzee says there is no magic recipe for winning golf, but the 13-time champion on the Sunshine Tour enjoyed more than a few ounces of inspiration on Saturday as a bogey-free 67 carried him back to the top of the leaderboard after the penultimate round of the PGA Championship at the St Francis Links.

Two birdies on the front nine and three coming in, two of them back-to-back on the 12^th and 13^th holes, lifted Coetzee to 11-under-par for the tournament and he is one stroke clear of Rhys West, who shot a 68.

Second-round leader Casey Jarvis posted a 71 on Saturday and is on nine-under-par, together with Stefan Wears-Taylor (67), Jake Redman (68) and Hennie Otto (69).

“It wasn’t really my plan to not get any bogeys, I just wanted to play good golf,” Coetzee said. “This course has some teeth and you have to pick those parts where you can be aggressive and where you can’t be aggressive.

“I think I balanced that out quite well, I made pars on the tough holes and birdies on some of the easier holes. Being experienced is more about what you do than what you know.

“But it does help that I am more conservative on a course that I don’t know that well, I kind of stick to how the course wants me to play.

“I think only Tiger Woods really knew how to win, the rest of us are all learning as we go along. I’ve won a few tournaments, but there’s no pattern to it, no magic recipe,” Coetzee said.

Overnight leader Jarvis had two eagles on the front nine, on the par-five third and then holing out with his second on the par-four fifth hole, but after a double-bogey six on the par-four 15^th he surrendered the lead to Coetzee.

There are also four golfers on seven-under-par who will be chasing after glory in the final round on Sunday – last week’s winner of the Vodacom Origins of Golf final Combrinck Smit (66), Luke Jerling (67), Peter Karmis (67) and Martin Vorster (71).

But after all the titles he has won, including the Vodacom Origins of Golf Series event at De Zalze in August, the 36-year-old Coetzee has clear aims for the final round.

“I will just be trying to make good decisions, try to play decent golf and be excited about playing under pressure,” Coetzee said.

Captain Marcell Coetzee will go to Japan after leading the Bulls against one of his former teams, the Sharks, in Pretoria on Sunday, but he assured on Wednesday that he will be back to resume his crucial role in the Loftus Versfeld community.

“This weekend is my last match for the Bulls this year, and I will be back at the back end of April or the first week of May,” Coetzee confirmed. “It’s a big opportunity for me in Japan with Kobe.

“But the positive is that I know I’m coming back, I missed my country too much during my five years with Ulster. It’s an honour playing for the Bulls and my home is in Pretoria, that’s where my heart definitely is.

“My rugby career started at the Sharks, they gave me a gap and were very good to me. But time moves on. And I’m very happy where I am with the Bulls, the staff and the team spirit we have built up.

“There’s lots of history between the Bulls and the Sharks, so it’s always a very physical battle. It’s going to be tough, even without their Springboks, a titanic struggle,” Coetzee said.

While one can never criticise a 31-year-old player for chasing a lucrative deal like this Japanese sojourn, and the Bulls are happy to treat it as a sabbatical for a player who they recently contracted until 2026, Coetzee hopes he will also come back a different player.

“In 2015 I spent three months in Japan with Honda Heat and my skill-set really improved,” the Springbok with 31 Test caps said. “So I’ll be looking to develop certain things while I’m there.

“They play very high-tempo rugby in Japan and you run a lot. The URC is getting quicker as well, especially when you play against the Irish and Scottish teams.

“The move will hopefully keep me on my toes because there are a lot of loosies coming through,” Coetzee said.

But for now, Coetzee’s focus will be on chasing the ball at the breakdown, as he did so brilliantly in the Bulls’ much-needed win over Benetton in Treviso last weekend.

“How the game has developed, teams put a lot of pressure on the breakdown, especially the UK teams, because you’re trying to eliminate the tempo of the opposition.

“We are blessed to have a few guys who make good decisions there – Marco van Staden, Bismarck du Plessis and a couple of backs.

“Against Benetton, we were firing shots and eventually the dam wall broke because we were able to implement our quick tempo game and we got a bonus point.

“We need to show the same patience against the Sharks, put pressure on them. We have to really show up because we can’t just rely on home ground advantage,” Coetzee said.

The Sharks, back in home port in Durban after meeting expectations on their three-week overseas tour, will be bringing a lot of pent-up energy to Loftus Versfeld on Sunday when they tackle the Bulls in a massive United Rugby Championship derby.

Victories on the road against Zebre and the Dragons was followed by a superb attacking showing against Leinster, who only pulled away in the final quarter in Dublin. With the Springboks returning to action, the Sharks exploded in the final half-hour of their homecoming match against the Glasgow Warriors, and there was a real sense of momentum building for their big clash with Ulster last weekend.

And then the match was controversially postponed the day before it was scheduled to happen. The one positive to offset the great disappointment felt at Kings Park is that an even fresher, hungrier Sharks side will now travel to Pretoria this weekend.

“It was quite shocking news to get on the Friday,” prop Ntuthuko Mchunu said on Wednesday. “We had had a really good week of preparation coming off a win, we were looking forward to the festivities of the day.

“And of course we were really looking forward to playing the game, having prepped so well and brushed up on a few things. But at least this week it means we are really fresh and looking forward again.

“It’s always a big game up there, two South African sides going at each other. It’s never easy at Loftus and both teams will front up. We have prepared well for a physical battle at set-piece.

“The Bulls have really good players, but what happened there in the past is past, we’re now looking forward to the future. It’s always a great game against the Bulls,” Mchunu said.

The Sharks will be without half-a-dozen of their frontline Springboks, but Mchunu says there is a real unity within the group remaining behind, following their achievements on the fields of Europe and the fun they had doing some urban sightseeing.

“The one thing the Sharks have done is grow the group. We prepared really well together in pre-season when the Springboks were away, and this team has grown.

“We showed a lot of fight and character against Leinster, it was an awesome tour that really grew us. The combinations worked well together and we want to carry that spirit through to this weekend,” Mchunu said.

The Bulls, meanwhile, are perhaps retreating into one of their laagers as they have been playing hard to get with the Fourth Estate from the start of the week.

Cricket South Africa have questioned the timing of former Australian captain Tim Paine’s allegations that the Proteas were also doing illegal work on the ball now that the great ball-tampering scandal of 2018 is back in the news.

Paine inherited the captaincy after Steve Smith was suspended, but stood down in November last year after it was revealed the married cricketer had been sending explicit messages to a Cricket Tasmania employee.

Paine’s autobiography, The Price Paid, was released on Tuesday and his shock accusations will obviously be great publicity for the book. Paine accuses the Proteas of ball-tampering even after Australia’s skulduggery with sandpaper was exposed at Newlands in the third Test, and David Warner, Cameron Bancroft and Smith were sent home in disgrace.

“I saw it happen in the fourth Test of that series. Think about that. After everything that had happened in Cape Town, after all the headlines and bans and carry-on,” Paine writes.

“I was standing at the bowlers’ end in the next Test when a shot came up on the screen of a South African player at mid-off having a huge crack at the ball.

“The television director, who had played an active role in catching out Cam, immediately pulled the shot off the screen.

“We went to the umpires about it, which might seem a bit poor, but we’d been slaughtered and were convinced they’d been up to it since the first Test. But the footage got lost. As it would,” Paine complained.

CSA chief executive Pholetsi Moseki told The Citizen it was upsetting that none of these allegations were made at the time of the numerous investigations that were held, and are now only appearing four-and-a-half years later.

“CSA and Cricket Australia have engaged on this matter and the necessary sanctions levied at the time. Both bodies have reiterated their commitment to a clean game, … above reproach,” Moseki said on Tuesday.

“It is unfortunate that allegations of ball-tampering are emerging at this stage, which information could have been useful had it come out at the time when the rot in the game was being rooted out.

“While CSA respects the rights of individuals to air their opinions, it also calls upon all those who love the game to come forward with any information of misconduct on the field at the appropriate time, and not wait for time to elapse. This will assist the relevant authorities within the system to investigate and institute appropriate relevant sanctions should they be required,” Moseki said.

Without their sandpaper, Australia’s attack in the fourth Test at the Wanderers had as much venom as a granny doing flower-arranging as the Proteas piled up 488 and 344/6 declared. Australia’s batting was equally lame as they crashed to 221 and 119 all out to be thrashed by 492 runs.