Ken Borland

The Bulls have lost the services of Springbok mainstay Trevor Nyakane but probably have five million reasons to be happy to let him go, with coach Jake White saying on Wednesday that he was “comfortable” with the versatile prop’s move.

The 32-year-old Nyakane, who played in 12 of the Springboks’ 13 Tests this year, has signed with French club Racing 92, and will begin his three-year deal in Paris before the end of the month. Nyakane had two more years to run on his Bulls contract, however, and the Pretoria franchise will reportedly receive R5 million from one of the leading clubs in Europe in compensation.

“Trevor is no longer with us, although we were going to give him time off until January anyway,” White said on Wednesday. “He was never going to stay with us forever and post the 2023 World Cup, I didn’t see him playing domestically anyway.

“It was always highly likely that he was going overseas and we haven’t had him for six months anyway, plus we were likely to not have him for big chunks of next year.

“He’s been fantastic for the Bulls and is a great team man, but in terms of return on investment, sometimes it’s the right time to release a player.

“We’re very comfortable letting him go and we are busy planning to get one or two other tightheads in our squad. It’s not ideal losing players overseas, but you don’t want to be paying big money for players if you never see them,” White said.

The former Springbok coach also suggested that the national team might have to go back to their previous policy of having zero overseas-based players in their line-up, in order to protect franchise rugby at home.

“It raises the question whether the policy of picking overseas players for the Springboks is going to last forever? Because long-term that policy is to the detriment of the franchises and that’s a fact,” White said.

“For me, the Irish and Kiwi model, where only home-based players are picked for the national team, works and they have been successful with it. Australia have the Matt Giteau rule allowing more experienced players from overseas to play for the Wallabies.

“At the moment I’m not sure the franchises get a return on investment because you have so many players unavailable for long periods and we have a salary cap. But we are not as affected as the Stormers or Sharks,” White said.

The Kalenjin tribe of Kenya’s Rift Valley are famous for their dominance of long-distance running, numerous world and Olympic champions having come from their population of about five million, a staggering statistical anomaly that has had sports scientists scrambling to study them.

While scientists have pointed to a complex interaction between genetic and socio-economic factors for their success, the Kalenjin runners are also famous for their stoicism and endurance. It is that combined with natural abilities, that makes them world-beaters. They use the word ‘tai’ as an exhortation to keep going forward and they certainly do just that.

Much of the work on the persevering, “no gain without pain” Kalenjin has been done at the University of Cape Town and perhaps the cricket fraternity based in the city that enjoys the best standard of living in the country needs to go and study up on key traits for sporting success like determination and not blaming your failures on your opposition.

The RamSlam T20 Challenge final takes place on Saturday in Centurion and some of the Cape Cobras management and media seem to believe that they are not there due to some incredible conspiracy that involves the Titans and the weather conspiring against them. Never mind the fact that the star-studded Cobras team did not win their first three games and then threw away a winning position in their last round-robin match, where victory would have seen them hosting the semi-final against the Dolphins that was washed out on Thursday evening in Durban.

As the 2019 World Cup nears and the mental fortitude of our players is once again put under the most ruthless of microscopes, it is alarming that many of our Proteas are playing in an environment where excuse-making, blaming others and even accusing other teams of matchfixing is encouraged.

The Titans, by topping the log by miles, earned the right to prepare for their semi-final in whatever manner they saw fit, and they decided to spare their leading players the exertions of travelling to Cape Town to play on Friday, then to Durban to play on Sunday and then returning to Centurion on Monday, leaving just one day to prepare for the knockout match.

Such are the rewards for performance and they should be praised for the high standards they have brought to the competition, not tainted by slanderous allegations in the Cape that they were involved in some sort of matchfixing.

Instead of trying to bring everyone down to their under-performing standards, the Cobras, who have a wealth of talent at their disposal, should rather be focused on bridging the gap between themselves and the Titans.

In keeping with the sore-losers image they are cultivating so well in Cape Town, some of their media were quick to jump all over the Titans for only fielding five players of colour in their semi-final win over the Warriors, due to Henry Davids mangling his knee shortly before the toss.

The word from Cricket South Africa is that there will be no action taken against the Titans because the move was cleared by the head of their transformation committee, Max Jordaan, beforehand. It was a common sense decision because four minutes before the toss is hardly the time to rush someone in from outside the squad, without a warm-up.

There was no complaint from the Warriors, either, but there will always be that element in the Western Cape that knows better, watching from their vantage point behind the Mountain.

It seems there will always be the haters in South African sport when a team enjoys prolonged success.

https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-citizen-gauteng/20171216/282570198460108