Ken Borland

The last time the Proteas played against Bangladesh in white-ball cricket was earlier this year when Bangladesh shocked them by winning the ODI series in South Africa, so there is a pace attack that is highly-motivated to do some damage when the two teams meet in the T20 World Cup in Sydney on Thursday.

The Proteas and Bangladesh were meant to play a warm-up game before the tournament, but that was washed out, and the rain then also forced South Africa’s opening match against Zimbabwe to be abandoned without a result. Given their experience in last year’s T20 World Cup, where they lost just their opening game but missed out on the semi-finals on nett run-rate, the Proteas know they have to win all four of their remaining matches to make sure they progress.

“Last year we learnt that every game is so important and we’ve wrapped our heads around having to win everything from here on in to give us the best chance of qualifying for the semis,” paceman Lungi Ngidi said on Wednesday.

“We’re definitely hungry to win, but every team is under pressure. The last time we played against Bangladesh, their batsmen came out pretty aggressively against us. So we will definitely target their top-order.

“They have Shakib al-Hasan to control the middle, but if we cut off the head of the snake up front, then hopefully we can restrict them to as low a total as possible.

“We will play towards our strengths and we have seen that pace has been most successful so far in the tournament. So we would like to attack them with our strength and we will see how they handle that tomorrow [Thursday],” Ngidi said.

The skilful 26-year-old also did not want to sell the Proteas bowling line-up short, saying they embraced talk about them possibly being the best pace attack in the world.

“For people to say we have the best attack in the world is an honour and privilege for us, it gives us lots of confidence as well,” Ngidi said. “It means we can walk with our heads held high.

“It also means we really want to showcase what we have. We have three or four seamers and everyone is better at something than someone else

“It makes the job a lot easier because it becomes pretty difficult with two seamers having to do everything.

“That gives the bowlers the sense of calm and confidence that’s needed in a tournament like this,” Ngidi said.

Unfortunately, there is a high probability of a lunchtime thundershower in Sydney putting a dampener on the Proteas’ efforts once again.

Play starts at 5am.

Having gambled and lost with his selection of Elton Jantjies at flyhalf, Springbok coach Jacques Nienaber bravely tried to limit the damage to his player’s confidence after the first Test against Wales at Loftus Versfeld.

Jantjies endured a miserable first half of skewed kicks out-of-hand, missed shots at goal and a dropped ball that led to a try, and was substituted before the start of the second half with the Springboks 18-3 down. Barring a few exceptions, the whole team had been sub-par in the first half, but with the help of pugnacious input from the bench, they staged a stirring comeback to win 32-29.

It is only right, though, that Nienaber stand up for Jantjies because the player was put in an invidious position by being selected for the first Test with, as the coach himself said after the game, “less than 30 minutes of game-time this year”.

I can understand why the risk was taken with Jantjies, who has only just recovered from a shoulder injury and whose club did not make the playoffs of Japan’s Rugby League One. The 31-year-old has also had the mental stress of being charged with malicious damage to property and contravention of the Aviation Act to deal with, before those charges were withdrawn after he agreed to pay for the damage he caused to an aeroplane flying back from Turkey.

Flyhalf is one of the few areas where the Springboks are lacking depth and the management were obviously planning ahead in case first-choice Handre Pollard suddenly gets injured. If Jantjies then had to come in and play with so little rugby under his belt, it could have been even worse.

The World Cup winner does now at least have 40 minutes of game-time, and hopefully the trauma of it has not dented his confidence too much.

Nienaber tried to sugarcoat his replacement as being because “he had given everything”, but when he said “he hasn’t played any rugby” he was closer to the reason why.

Despite the fan furore, Jantjies is still a player who has much to offer the Springboks. What he is capable of when in form definitely adds some attacking spark to a team which, for long periods of the first half against Wales, looked desperately in need of some offensive verve.

How he bounces back from this calamitous showing is what matters now.

The South African men’s hockey team’s hopes at the Commonwealth Games were quickly extinguished, but apart from scuppering any possibility of them adding to the Proteas squad’s impressive haul of medals, more insidious damage was done to the image of the game as a whole in this country.

South Africa began their campaign with a disappointing 4-2 loss to Scotland, who are not even in the top-20 of the world rankings, and were then hammered 4-0 by Australia and 6-0 by New Zealand. They ended the pool stage with a good 2-0 win over 11^th-ranked Canada, but they were still condemned to playing in the wooden-spoon playoff for ninth and 10^th place.

A 3-2 defeat at the hands of Wales, ranked 24^th in the world, completed a shocking tournament for South Africa.

No-one is questioning the commitment of the team, who are, after all, basically amateurs trying to compete with professionals, but questions have to be asked about the selection of the squad.

Surely for a tournament of the Commonwealth Games’ stature – which attracts plenty of media attention back home – the selectors should fill the team with their most experienced, best players? This was not the case with several seasoned campaigners being left at home as SA hockey tried to ‘build for the future’.

The South African Hockey Association (Saha) like to give plenty of lip about a lack of financial support from Sascoc and corporates, but in this instance they have shot themselves in the foot.

The Commonwealth Games, with its widespread coverage, is the ideal platform – second only to the Olympics in terms of our hockey – for SA hockey to make a statement. Winning a medal, which is not a realistic target in the World Cup later this year, would make the public and potential sponsors and supporters sit up and take notice.

Even our women’s side, which is a top-class outfit, disappointed, only managing to finish sixth thanks to defeats to India and Canada and a draw with Malaysia. Canada and Malaysia are not even ranked in the world top-20, while South Africa are 14^th.

It all just showed a lack of strategic thinking by Saha. No doubt the powers that be will say something about the mechanics of preparation for the World Cup being behind the Commonwealth Games failure. But a Commonwealth Games medal – or even a strong run for one – would have been a real fillip for the game back home, engendering far more positive PR than a 10^th-place finish in a World Cup that the average South African will be totally oblivious about.

A full-strength South African side would have had a chance to nick a medal on the Gold Coast, something which nobody expects them to do in the World Cup. Now, instead, the public opinion of hockey will once again be of a bunch of no-hopers.

Saha needs to make better decisions to ensure they at least give their under-resourced, struggling national teams some gloss.

https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-citizen-gauteng/20180421/282376925178424