Ken Borland

EDENVALE (Gauteng) – Kyle Barker has been trying to massage his game in preparation for DP World Tour Qualifying School at the end of this month in Spain, and the 26-year-old fired an exceptional 63 in the opening round of the Fortress Invitational at Glendower Golf Club on Thursday to fill him with confidence.

The Serengeti Estates golfer enjoys a one-stroke lead in the R2 million event, after Werner Deyzel and defending champion Robin Williams pushed him hard with 64s.

Barker’s nine-under-par score, which was also bogey-free, was his best round of the season and it seems he could be peaking at the right time after a solid, but unspectacular start to the campaign sees him sitting in 18^th position on the Order of Merit delivered by The Courier Guy.

“I had a great first couple of months but then things just slowed down. I was struggling a bit with my game and the set-up in my bag. But now I’ve found a really nice putter that is rolling the ball fantastically.

“This is my last event before going to DP World Tour Qualifying School and I really enjoyed the day. I was hitting the ball really nicely on the range in my warm-up and I just wanted to keep that feeling going, so birdies on the first two holes was a great way to start. I didn’t know that I was going to make only 26 putts though!

“The greens were very receptive after rain on Tuesday night, long-irons were pretty much stopping where they landed and wayward tee-shots would not bounce into too much trouble under trees. So I could be quite aggressive, but the back nine was a bit tougher because the wind picked up,” Barker said.

The highlight of a round that was just the right therapy for Barker was his eagle on the par-five 11^th.

“I smashed a drive down the middle and I had 196m to the front left, but the wind was slightly in my face, about seven or eight metres. So I hit a 205 shot with a six-iron, it was a bit long, in the middle of the green, but I had a downhill, 30ft putt which straight in the middle of the hole, which was really cool,” Barker explained.

Deyzel and Williams also had eagles in the first round, both of them on the 500m par-five sixth. Williams hit a brilliant seven-iron from 165 metres to three feet, which put him level with Barker on nine-under-par, but he bogeyed the par-three eighth, his penultimate hole.

Williams continued the momentum from his brilliant fourth-place finish in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship earlier this month and he was satisfied that he had positioned himself well in his first defence of a title in his professional career.

“It’s been really cool today, it’s the first time I’ve defended and I’m just remembering all the good memories from last year. It all kicked off for me here last year. Playing in Europe was good, but it is so tough there because everything is so different.

“My game was really good today, everything was solid, just a bit of a mistake on eight. But I kept the ball on the fairways. It’s just a course I really enjoy, the par-fives are not that long, so I picture them as par-fours and try to be more aggressive, as long as you find the fairway. I drove well and was able to take advantage of the par-fives.

“I will definitely take that first round, I just want to put myself in position to defend on the back nine on Sunday,” Williams said.

Kathu, Northern Cape (19 September 2024) – Werner Deyzel and amateur partner Hennie Muller had a brush with a count-out on their final hole of the Vodacom Origins of Golf Sishen Pro-Am on Thursday, but in the end a par and a bogey were enough for them to clinch a one-point victory on 93 points.

Deyzel steered Bloemfontein-based 16-handicapper Muller to the trophy after Craig Ross had laid a good platform as his pro on the first day. The Sishen Vodacom Origins of Golf Pro-Am had a slightly different format to other events in the series, with the amateurs pairing with two different professionals over the two days.

Woodhill Country Club golfer Deyzel and Muller beat out four other teams, who all finished on 92 points, for the title on Thursday: Neil Schietekat, Quintin Wilsnach and Tebogo Ruwana were second on a count-out from Rhys West, Regan Steyn and Steve Tshabalala in third; Jovan Rebula, Jbe’ Kruger and Mxolisi Dukwana were fourth; and fifth-placed Matthew Spacey, Toto Thimba Jnr and Luke Saffy completed the prizewinners.

“Hennie had a check on the live scoring on the ninth tee and saw we were tied for first place. So we knew we needed a three-pointer, but unfortunately Hennie hit his tee-shot a bit left. I hit a good drive and managed to make par, and Hennie made a five so we had two two-pointers. We were sure someone would get a three-pointer, but fortunately that turned out to be enough in the end,” Deyzel said. “I played well but it was thanks to my ammie Hennie that we won. He was very solid, played very well and he made a lot of points.”

Deyzel is a rookie player on the Sunshine Tour, having excelled on the Blue Label Development Tour. The 24-year-old is a phlegmatic golfer and, currently 40^th on the Order of Merit delivered by The Courier Guy, he knows he is not playing badly, but he also knows a small change of fortunes in terms of posting a few low scores, could be just around the corner with the Vodacom Origins of Golf Sishen tournament starting on Friday.

“My game is not bad at the moment, but I wouldn’t say it is very good either. I just need some putts to drop and then I will be making the good scores. But it’s been fun playing with the amateurs and Vodacom’s clients and it also allows us to get a practice round in before the tournament proper.

“It’s my second time playing at Sishen Golf Club, I’ve played in an amateur event here before. So I feel like I know the course quite well. Considering the time of year and the amount of rain that they have not had, the course is in spectacular condition,” Deyzel said.

Another season of the Women’s Premier Division came to an end last weekend with the Bulls Daisies securing back-to-back titles, and the attention in local ladies rugby will now pivot to the newly-announced Super League professional franchise competition recently announced by SA Rugby.

While the Super League would be a boost for the growth of high-performance women’s rugby in South Africa, there are still pivotal questions around when it will start and how it will work, especially in terms of player contracting.

SA Rugby said they intend to contract 150 women players for the new competition, with the provincial unions being invited to submit proposals for inclusion of a franchise in the new Super League.

But the Bulls, who made a groundbreaking move to being fully professional last year, already have 35 players contracted and the vast majority of those will be offered new contracts on September 1.

SA Rugby want the Super League to begin in early 2025 and have said the “centrally contacted players will be shared out among the teams”. Unless the 150 given SA Rugby contracts don’t include any Bulls players, there is going to be a tug-of-war over the services of the players who have dominated the Women’s Premier Division over the last two seasons.

“We will entrench our players,” Thando Manana, the executive in charge of women’s rugby for the Blue Bulls Company, told Rapport. “SA Rugby say they are going to contract 150 players and although it is good to have this innovation, we need to tread carefully in our rush to get this Super League underway. There’s definitely going to be a timing issue if they want to start in January.

“I love anything that develops the game, but we can’t wait for all the details to come out, we will be renewing contracts for the new cycle that starts on September 1, and some of those will be extended to two or three years. We’re not looking at what others do, we will be pushing forward in the months ahead to take women’s rugby to another level,” Manana said.

Blue Bulls Rugby Union president Willem Strauss said he would rather reserve comment on the Super League until they have more information.

“I don’t know much about it, but anything that takes women’s rugby to the next level, I will support. But I need to know the details about the Super League, hopefully it aligns commercially with what we have done with such success over the last two years.

“As a board, we are very happy with what we have achieved in women’s rugby. It was a brave step to go professional in the women’s game because the financial impact was negative. But once we started performing then we started to attract commercial partners.

“Our team has improved a helluva lot and this year we had to use a lot of club players because of national team call-ups. But the number of women taking up the game has expanded by 30% per year, which is fantastic because it shows that going professional is sustainable. There are more and more women’s teams joining the league, as well as youth clubs, which shows that the ecosystem is healthy.

“Plus the Bulls Daisies bring a new audience to Loftus Versfeld which is very important, it’s not a traditional Pretoria crowd. The Bulls Daisies have certainly added value to our brand of excellence and they are inspiring the next generation of women’s stars,” Strauss told Rapport.

Lynne Cantwell, SA Rugby’s High Performance Manager for women’s rugby, praised the Bulls for their top-class programme and said the aim of the Super League was to get the rest of the country’s players to that level of excellence.

“The goal of the competition is to make that leap into where the performance standards align. Once we get there, all the teams will be more competitive and the women’s tournament will go down to the wire, we want to get to the situation where you never know who is going to win.

“The Bulls took that leap two years ago and have led the way, and we’ve seen their big performance leap. You have to give credit to Western Province, and the fact that they pushed the Bulls in the final is testament to their pipeline. There are great signs of growth, they are swelling their player numbers and Boland have done this as well.

“The goal is to have all our premier teams to be like the Bulls, and then that will make for a strong national team. The Super League will be performance-driven, and hopefully that means teams can ask more of sponsors, they can pitch higher because of increased visibility. That will drive game standards and allow teams to employ high-quality coaches, physios, medics and strength-and-conditioning coaches,” Cantwell told Rapport.

The former Ireland star envisages a league with four or five teams, with each side playing eight to 10 matches. The Super League will not replace the Premier Division because it will be played at a different time of year.

Cantwell is keen on a draft system to allocate the contracted players, but she acknowledges the Bulls issue will need to be resolved.

“The Bulls have a significant number of our top players and it will need to be a gradual approach in terms of how we spread the top players around. The Super League will be our top-end competition, but it will take a couple of years for everything to be aligned.

“We want the other teams to have programmes that are the equivalent of the Bulls. With SA Rugby funding the player contracts, there won’t be as much pooling of players at a single union because we can say where they must play,” Cantwell said.

South Africa’s Allan Donald and Herschelle Gibbs are both well-acquainted with the sorrow of World Cup failure, but the pair of cricketing legends believe that the current crop of Proteas who are in the West Indies will end the country’s startling lack of success in showpiece events when they compete in the T20 World Cup final at Bridgetown, Barbados, on Saturday.

The Proteas bowled Afghanistan out for a record low of just 56 on their way to a commanding nine-wicket victory in their semi-final on Wednesday night in Tarouba, Trinidad, and will meet the winners of Thursday’s semi-final between India and England in the final.

Despite being consistently one of the strongest teams in international cricket since returning from isolation in 1991, South Africa’s men’s team have never before reached a major International Cricket Council final. They had lost out in seven previous semi-finals before their triumph against Afghanistan.

Renowned fast bowler Donald and dashing opening batsman Gibbs both played in the 1999 World Cup semi-final against Australia at Edgbaston, which is probably South Africa’s most famous ‘defeat’ of all. The match ended in a tie after Donald was run out, having set off late and dropping his bat, meaning Australia went through based on their higher log-position.

The eventual champions had finished above South Africa thanks to beating them four days earlier by five wickets with two balls to spare in a Super Sixes match at Leeds. Chasing 272, Australia were in trouble on 48 for three when captain Steve Waugh came to the crease. He had just reached his half-century when Gibbs dropped an easy catch from him at midwicket, spilling the ball as he tried to throw it up in a premature celebration. Waugh would go on to score a magnificent 120 not out. Gibbs had earlier been the mainstay of the South African innings with his 101.

“I honestly believe this is South Africa’s time,” Donald told SportsBoom.com, “they are battle-hardened and mentally-conditioned now to winning the very big moments. They have found a way to win every time, someone has made a breakthrough or someone has come up with crucial runs eight matches in a row.

“Coach Rob Walter has brought top character through and made everyone responsible. I really think it is their time. They are playing with fantastic calmness and are really tight-knit as a squad,” Donald, who also fell short in the 1992, 96 and 2003 World Cups, said.

Gibbs told SportsBoom.com that he also believed the time was now to end South Africa’s World Cup jinx.

“T20 cricket is all about momentum and momentum is with the Proteas. They have done it the hard way and now that they’ve got to the final, I believe the cricketing gods will smile on us.

“Our bowling line-up is as good as any and with the pitches doing so much, the bowlers are always in play. Captain Aiden Markram’s decision-making has been really good, he’s made the changes, the big calls, at the right times. He shows a lot of composure in reading the situation. The final will be the ultimate game and playing the situation is the vital thing,” Gibbs, who was also part of the failed 2003 and 2007 campaigns, as well as the 2007, 2009 and 2010 T20 World Cup tournaments, said.

Gibbs, who was one of the most dashing batsmen of his era and would have earned himself millions of rand in franchise cricket had he been born 10 years later, also said that the tricky pitches in the current T20 World Cup had shown modern batters were not willing to grind through tough conditions.

“The pitches have done a lot, it’s been a bit excessive at times, but then average batsmen can look world-class on flat decks – they just hit through the line. The IPL scores were a bit ridiculous this year and the game needed to be brought down to earth a little.

“The tough conditions bring out the temperament of the batsmen and technique is needed. When bowlers have been able to land the ball in the right areas at the right pace, the batters have not been able to handle it because of their flawed techniques. They’re just used to taking the easy route, they don’t grind, they don’t fancy it. You need gritty innings in those conditions.

“At the IPL final for Deccan Chargers at the Wanderers in 2009, I scored 53 not out in the 20 overs because I knew I just had to be there. Anil Kumble bowled the first over for Bangalore and Adam Gilchrist charged down the pitch third ball and was bowled.

“But I said to myself that I must just have a look, the onus was on me, you have to take that responsibility on your shoulders. You have to allow yourself to get to grips with the surface and the tough runs are the most satisfying,” Gibbs said of the Deccan Chargers’ six-run win in South Africa.

The 50-year-old Gibbs said he expected the batsmen to have another mountain to climb at the Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, but the IPL experience of the likes of Heinrich Klaasen, Quinton de Kock, Tristan Stubbs, Markram and David Miller should stand them in good stead.

“In the CPL, that pitch has turned and there have been a lot of close games. Our spinners can come to the party with the ball, but for the batsmen, building partnerships against spin is going to be the key. It’s something they still haven’t mastered and they will need to do it.

“Heinrich Klaasen says the pressure of the IPL will stand them in good stead and they need to show that the pressure does not get to them because BMT has been our achilles heel in the past. But this team has found ways to win,” Gibbs said.

Donald, as coach, and Gibbs will return next week to Edgbaston, the scene of their agonising near-miss in 1999, representing South Africa in the World Championship of Legends, a new six-team T20 tournament that has signed a five-year contract with the England and Wales Cricket Board.