Ken Borland

It is not that surprising to see young Bulls lock Walt Steenkamp playing with extreme vigour in the Rainbow Cup, given that the 25-year-old came down with Covid at the end of last year, which then affected his heart, meaning he only returned to the field three weeks ago.

Steenkamp came down with a particularly virulent but rare strain of the Covid-19 virus that attacks the heart muscle, leaving him with arrhythmia, a condition in which his heart-rate struggles to return to normal after exercise. It actually required surgery in which the misfiring electrical signals are corrected.

“After five months of not playing it’s lovely to be back and playing in a winning team again. But it was quite heavy going through that, I will take nothing for granted again when it comes to playing rugby, it was a big fright. Fortunately the doctors never said I would definitely have to give up rugby, so I always believed I would come back.

“I actually had to have the operation twice, it’s called an ablation – they insert catheters that destroy the tissue that’s causing the abnormal heart signals, turn it into scar tissue. I had just 20% heart function before the operations but it’s all perfect now. And I really value being back in the lovely culture of this team,” Steenkamp said this week.

The former Free State Cheetahs and North-West Leopards star has made a big impact since joining the Bulls last November and has made some major plays, especially a crucial lineout steal five metres from their own line against the Sharks when the Bulls had just gone 19-9 up last weekend. Steenkamp clearly has a big engine, he is mobile but also a big-hitter in the physical exchanges.

But even as a relative youngster, Steenkamp has noticed how the game of rugby is changing, which presents fresh challenges, especially in terms of adapting to the new way tackles are being refereed, which many people consider a cancer in the game.

“Rugby has changed a lot, but Jake White is a mastermind, he knows what it takes to win and we’re doing the right things at the moment. The rules now make it harder to do what locks used to do. There’s more focus on fitness now and we have to be more careful, especially when it comes to tackles,” Steenkamp said.

The players of Australia, England and India are probably the fat cats of the cricketing world, given the riches of their respective boards and the hefty contracts they enjoy. While I have no problem with top international sportsmen being handsomely paid, it would be nice now and then to see them display some perspective and gratitude for living the dream.

The Indian Premier League of course offers the biggest payday of them all, which is why player power has ensured no major international cricket is staged during that tournament. Again, that is the economics of the game and I don’t mind that.

But the players should just be honest about the fact that the IPL is their biggest priority and, as the players of Australia and England have shown, the riches on offer there are often more important to them than any ethical considerations or obligations to grow the game as a whole.

The self-same Australian and England players who turned their noses up at playing in South Africa and possibly coming into contact with the Covid-19 pandemic that was recording about 3000 cases a day in December and 1000 in March were happy to go to India for the IPL when cases were already at more than 80 000 a day. It was a staggering display of hypocrisy and double standards.

And it got worse because as soon as the IPL itself was put under threat, it was the Australian players who began bleating about the government having an obligation to organise special flights out of India for them and change the law that applied to everyone else that the borders were closed for people who had recently been to India.

It’s ironic, but these are people who have been living in a bubble since way before Covid-19 arrived. They live in their own mollycoddled world where everything is taken care of for them, they are treated as demi-gods and too many of them seem totally out of touch with the common person. It’s why things like Sandpapergate happened because pampered stars like Steven Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft are out of touch with reality.

It was absolutely infuriating the way the Australian players dumped the South African tour at the last moment as soon as it meant they might have some difficulties getting to India thereafter for the IPL, which was always going to be a much harder bubble to manage than the one here.

Likewise the English players, who used a couple of positive tests outside of their squad to hightail it home, doing great damage to Cricket South Africa’s reputation and coffers.

No wonder cricket fans around the world get so angry when talk of the Big Three dictating the game comes up.

The bad vibrations of karma will no doubt follow these selfish cricketers and it was hard to feel any sympathy for the Aussie players who were stuck in India for a while; they did after all land up slumming it in the Maldives. Even the England players have now shown their true colours and they have not only been criticised by former captains like Mike Atherton and Michael Vaughan for what they did in South Africa, but their own England and Wales Cricket Board CEO Tom Harrison, who has been very helpful to CSA, now knows what they are like when it comes to negotiating new contracts.

To end on a positive note though: Cricket South Africa, chief medical officer Dr Shuaib Manjra and his doctors, and the compliance officers, all deserve enormous credit for how well-run our bubbles were last summer. There were only negligible issues and they have proven how safe it will be for any touring teams to come here.

Cricket South Africa’s Interim Board have clarified the process for the appointment of independent directors and, as long as the Members Council are still behaving like adults and have given the new MoI majority approval by 11am on Wednesday morning, what the new constitution says about the recruitment of new board members will be thoroughly explained to the public.

The Interim Board on Wednesday morning disputed suggestions published by The Citizen that they have any knowledge of who the applicants to be independent directors are and that they play any role in drawing up a shortlist for the Nominations Committee.

“The Interim Board does not know who has applied and will not be involved in the nominations process other than recruiting one former CSA president to serve on the Nominations Committee. All the applications are under lock and key in the office and will be passed on directly from the office to the Nominations Committee as soon as they are in place,” Interim Board spokeswoman Judith February told The Citizen.

The Interim Board hope to make the whole Memorandum of Incorporation public once the Special Resolution accepting it has been confirmed and will hold a briefing to take the media through the process thereafter.

The Nominations Committee also needs to be put in place later this week and that six-member panel will comprise either a men’s or women’s former international player nominated by SACA, alongside a former CSA president nominated by the Interim Board, a Members Council representative and people from the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Institute of Directors and the Legal Practice Council.

“The Interim Board is certainly not going to be appointing the new board and according to our agreement with the sports minister, nobody from the Interim Board is going to be standing for the new board,” February added.

Playing all of their fixtures against the European sides on foreign shores is going to prejudice the hopes of the four South African teams in the Rainbow Cup, but Sharks coach Sean Everitt believes his team should still be competitive given their history of travelling well during SuperRugby.

The Rainbow Cup starts on April 24, with the South African franchises playing local derbies on the first three weekends. They then cross over to the Northern Hemisphere to play the existing Pro14 sides. While the fixtures for Rounds 4-6 have not yet been confirmed due to uncertainty over travel plans, those matches will all definitely be in Europe.

“We only have three domestic games and two of ours are not at Kings Park, but those are the cards we have been dealt and we just have to get on with it. But the Sharks have always travelled well and I expect the same. We will be there for two weeks before our first game so we can get used to conditions and I don’t think conditions will be as severe at the end of May as some people are expecting.

“We are looking forward to the challenge of playing against new teams and creating new memories and great experiences. But I think SuperRugby will be missed because it suited our style of play, we want to attack, it’s in our DNA, and it was a great competition. Our squad will stay the same as now, we’re only allowed to sign 45 players and I think we have to take 42 of them over there,” Everitt said at the weekend.

While the beloved free-flowing play of SuperRugby will be missed, Bulls coach Jake White said some of the less appealing features of the southern hemisphere competition once it expanded – such as the lopsided nature of the draw – will be repeated in the Rainbow Cup.

“We know our first three games are in South Africa so that’s our focus. But it’s not ideal to be playing all the European teams away, especially if conditions get helluva tough. But it’s going to be the same for all the South African sides. The Rainbow Cup is a very unique competition in that you have six games to get into the final and four of ours are away from home.

“But we’re lucky because some teams [the Sharks] have five away games. It’s a great opportunity to prepare for when we actually do play Pro16, but it’s a bit like SuperRugby if you didn’t have the favourable draw. Like if you had to play the Crusaders, Chiefs and Hurricanes away, you had a very much more difficult draw than the teams that played them in South Africa,” White said.