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Ken Borland



Proteas could do with unearthing a death-bowling gem in 3rd ODI 0

Posted on August 03, 2021 by Ken

There is no denying that the death overs of an ODI, with set batsmen at the crease, are a daunting time to be bowling, but as the old saying goes, diamonds are created under pressure and the Proteas could do with unearthing a gem soon.

The death bowling has been a perpetual problem for the Proteas and it was once again their achilles heel in the second ODI against Ireland in Dublin, with the home side lashing 95 runs in the last eight overs on their way to a shock 43-run victory, their first ever against South Africa.

The third and final ODI will be played at the same Malahide venue on Friday and the Proteas have to win to avoid arguably their most embarrassing series defeat ever. And, judging by his comments after the second game, captain Temba Bavuma has lost patience with the bowlers who have failed to execute the plan.

Changes in personnel are likely on Friday and Lizaad Williams, the Titans seamer who has been in fine form in domestic white-ball cricket, looks likely to be included for the decider. The 27-year-old has shown in the Momentum One-Day Cup that he has good accuracy and, in the four T20 Internationals he has played, he stayed aggressive and looked up for the intensity of the game at the highest level.

“Temba probably has reason to be upset because the team did not perform well. The last 10 overs went for more than a hundred runs and the death bowling was something we spoke long and hard about in the West Indies. But now we find ourselves in the same situation again. So we’re looking at making a few changes. Lizaad is definitely in the picture.

“He’s been doing well, he’s a skiddy bowler and he brings different skills. In the middle overs we want to be bowling wicket-to-wicket, but at the death I just think the game-plans have not been executed. Maybe the guys are trying too many things, perhaps they have too many different balls in their arsenal and maybe we should be telling them to just limit themselves to a couple,” bowling coach Charl Langeveldt said on Thursday.

Langeveldt also agreed that the Proteas needed to take more wickets up front, with Ireland’s openers batting through the 10-over powerplay in both matches so far. He hinted that the policy of playing the best team for every game might also be under review.

“Our plan is to take wickets up front, squeeze in the middle and then hopefully you’re bowling to all-rounders and bowlers at the end of the innings. We’ve spoken long and hard about taking wickets up front, applying pressure and then it becomes much easier to bowl in the middle when the opposition don’t have set batsmen and new guys can’t just come in and play.

“A lot of other teams use different players for the different formats and maybe we can do that a bit better. It can be hard changing from hard Test lengths to T20 cricket, that’s not an excuse, but maybe we can use fresh players, with fresh minds, more. But then again our bowlers won the T20 series for us in the West Indies, they bowled well there,” Langeveldt mused.

Maudlin cries about best talent going overseas coming to the fore again 0

Posted on June 21, 2021 by Ken

The maudlin cries complaining that all our best talent goes overseas is something we are quite used to hearing in cricket and rugby and the issue has come to the fore again with Devon Conway’s spectacular debut for New Zealand’s impressive Black Caps cricket team and Springbok director of rugby Rassie Erasmus announcing a squad of which nearly 50% were based overseas.

Top sportspeople taking their skills elsewhere is one of the biggest challenges facing our administrators, but it is also a problem that the country faces as a whole in a wide range of fields. On the sporting side, there is not much cash-strapped Cricket South Africa nor SA Rugby can do about the major socio-economic issues that are driving emigration.

Erasmus has bemoaned the financial realities that mean it is just about impossible for SA Rugby to stop their leading players from taking lucrative contracts overseas; the Rand simply cannot compete. And appealing to professional sportspeople to consider the good of the game back home is a bit like pleading with a kid to eat their broccoli because it’s good for them.

But by choosing a Springbok squad to play the British and Irish Lions in which 22 of the 46 members are based overseas, Erasmus is in a way encouraging what he was complaining about. Local players see that squad packed with emigrants and must be thinking that heading off to Europe or Japan will be a fruitful endeavour.

And not just in terms of their wallets. This latest Springbok squad selection has almost sent a message that you are more likely to be picked if you are based overseas.

There are so many talents blossoming in South African domestic rugby at the moment – the likes of Ruan Nortje, Lizo Gqoboka, JD Schickerling and even the reinvented Cornal Hendricks – but it seems every time there was a 50/50 call, the selection went the way of the guy based overseas.

Erasmus has expressed his disappointment that there are so many of our players offshore, but favouring the exiles when it comes to selection is not going to help restrict the numbers departing.

The tacit statement behind the selection is that the standard of overseas rugby – even in Japan – is better than that of the South African domestic game, which is not a great admission for the director of rugby to make.

A 50% overseas Springbok team is also harder for the general South African public, the vast majority of whom do not have satellite TV, to relate to and support. How many rugby fans have actually seen Coenie Oosthuizen play lately? But most rugby fans will know that Gqoboka has been in rampaging form for the Bulls.

Ever since Apartheid was introduced to rip apart the fabric of our society, we have lost cricketers to overseas teams. The original outflux was to England, but lately there has been a surge of South African products playing for New Zealand.

Amazing as it might be for a country of five million people and more than 26 million sheep, New Zealand is not just the best producer of woollen products in the world, but they stand on the verge of being the best Test cricket team on the planet as well. That after falling just one run (or one boundary or one correct umpiring decision) short of winning the ODI World Cup.

So New Zealand certainly have a strong national cricket team at the moment. Which is ironic because there have been a pile of South African imports who couldn’t crack it here but have made it big on that island.

Left-arm quick Neil Wagner is the current enforcer of the bowling attack, BJ Watling is arguably the best Test wicketkeeper/batsman in the world (joining Kruger van Wyk and Glen Phillips as Saffers who have donned the gloves for the Black Caps), Colin Munro is a flashy white-ball player and no-one should need reminding of what Grant Elliott did to the Proteas in the 2015 World Cup semi-final.

Conway has now joined that list and his is an interesting tale. Having been a schoolboy prodigy, the Johannesburger went through hell just trying to establish himself as a franchise cricketer. In 21 four-day franchise games he could only average 21 and his white-ball averages are almost identical.

And then in 2017 he decided to make a fresh start halfway across the world and pow! Conway is now one of the most exciting newcomers to international cricket and his 200 against England on Test debut at Lord’s must be one of the finest performances in a first Test ever.

But blaming CSA for letting this late-blooming talent slip through their fingers is one of my pet hates. Sure, transformation priorities do lead to certain people being favoured when it comes to selection, but Conway was given every opportunity here but for some reason just could not perform well enough to become a household name.

He deserves nothing but praise though for how he has rejuvenated his career.

THE TROUBLE WITH ELEPHANTS 0

Posted on August 14, 2018 by Ken

 

 

Woodland Kingfisher

Woodland Kingfisher

by Anthony Stidolph

I am not a man who deliberately courts disaster or intentionally goes looking for bad experiences. By the same token, I am not such a fool as to think the odd mishap won’t occasionally befall me. And when you go travelling with my birding partner Ken, rotten luck does have a habit of following you around.

For example: on a recent trip to Marakele National Park we found ourselves being chased down a narrow, twisting mountain pass in reverse by a very angry elephant who clearly resented our presence in his private domain.  Luckily – I have a feeling some benevolent deity saw fit to intervene – we survived that harrowing encounter. What I did not realise was that more trouble with elephants lay ahead…

 

From Marakele we had followed a circuitous route that took us to Blouberg Nature Reserve and then cut east along the base of the Soutpansberg range to Punda Maria in North Kruger. We planned to camp the night here and then press on to Pafuri the next day, where we hoped to get in some good birding.

Up until now the weather had been kindly – more spring than summer and I had even found myself wearing a jacket in the evenings and early mornings. In Kruger, however, the hot weather we had been expecting all along finally caught up with us, with the temperature soaring up to 39 degrees. The air around us was heavy and listless and steamy, almost tropical, perhaps hardly surprising since we had crossed over the Tropic of Capricorn some days before.

Eager to be off, I was up early the next day although I had to first wait for Ken to complete his complicated early-morning-ablution rituals. Once he was done with that, we set off northwards through the familiar vastness of flat grassland and mopane trees. On the way we stopped to allow the biggest herd of elephants I have ever seen cross the road. Shortly afterwards we were forced to repeat this exercise for an even bigger herd of buffalo.

The common bird in this neck of the woods – or at least the most vocal – is the Rattling Cisticola. There seemed to be one trilling its silly head off on top of virtually every second tree we passed.

Cisticola, Wailing, Kruger

The highly-vocal Rattling Cisticola – Can rub some people up the wrong way

As you draw close to Pafuri, the terrain starts to break up and rearrange itself and you are suddenly confronted by the arresting sight of Baobab Hill, with its commanding views over the Limpopo Valley. In the early days this iconic hill served as both a landmark and sleepover point for the ox-wagons travelling up from Mozambique.

By the time we got to Pafuri the sun was high and blazing. There had obviously been no rain here this season and the grass was pale and dry, although the trees had mostly come out in leaf.

At the crossroads we turned left down the Nyala Drive, which takes you into some wonderfully hilly country before taking a lazy loop back to the main road. Ken likes this less-used drive because, he says, it often throws up unexpected surprises.

There wasn’t much on offing this time around besides the usual suspects – Meves’s Starlings, Arrowmarked Babblers, Whitefronted Bee-eaters and Emeraldspotted Wood Dove. We passed a solitary elephant but he paid us no mind.

On the top of the small, baobab-clad hillock, directly above where the road swings back, is the Thulamela archaeological site, a restored Zimbabwe-type ruin. Unfortunately you can only go up with a guide and because of our tight schedule we did not have time for that.

One of the commanding Baobab trees of northern Kruger. This painting by Stidy is available for sale. 42x60 stidy@sai.co.za

One of the commanding Baobab trees of northern Kruger.
This painting by Stidy is available for sale. 42×60 stidy@sai.co.za

From the Nyala Drive we crossed back over the main tar road and followed the dirt track that takes you to Crooks Corner, where the brown waters of the Luvuvhu collide with the blue of the Limpopo. The combination of water, sun and rich alluvial soils has led to a proliferation of vegetation along the rivers’ banks so that you drive through a glittering tunnel of Sycamore Figs, Nyala trees, Jackal Berry, Ana and Fever trees.

Crooks’ Corner, where you can get out of your cars, marks the border between South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. In the early 1900s this remotest of places gained its moniker and dodgy reputation with gun-runners, fugitives and others on the run from the law, using it as a safe haven because it was easy to hop across the border whenever the police from one country approached.

Distinctly, there was a sense of a frontier on that lazy meandering river, although I don’t think the solitary Saddlebilled Stork fishing in its waters gave a fig where the international boundary lay or as to who held sovereignty over the country he was standing in.

Normally, it feels like you can’t get much further away from civilization than here, but we had chosen a busy weekend to visit so it was like a major thoroughfare with a steady stream of traffic passing through. Many of the visitors didn’t even bother to wind down their windows or get out of their luxury 4x4s because it would mean switching off their air-conditioners. They just drove in, stopped, glanced around and drove out again, leaving me to wonder why they had bothered to come all this way …

Needless to say Ken – who, contrarily, makes it a rule to ALWAYS switch off his air-conditioner when he enters a park because he likes to experience Africa in all its extremes –  and I did get out.

Rich plant life invariably means rich animal and bird life and Pafuri is no exception. In the past the storied riverine forest has provided both of us with some good sightings. It was here I saw my first Gorgeous Bush Shrike, Bohm’s Spinetail and Ayre’s Hawk Eagle. I have also recorded Lesser Jacana, Greencapped Eremomela, Hooded Vulture, Tropical Boubou and the palm-dwelling Lemonbreasted Canary.

This time, we could hear both the Gorgeous Bush Shrike and a melodious Whitebrowed Robin-Chat calling from the depth of a nearby thicket but could not entice either of them out.  Instead we had to make do with a bunch of waders and a noisy party of Trumpeter Hornbills who, I think, were off to join the celebrations in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

It was now well past lunchtime so we doubled back to the Pafuri picnic site on the edge of the Luvuvhu. Feeling somewhat dehydrated, I was desperate for an ice-cold coke but had to wait patiently in queue behind an American who was explaining to the bemused coke seller-cum bird guide – who, I suspect, knew the answer but was too polite to say so – what a turkey is (“It’s a big black bird with a red head”).

At this juncture of its journey the Luvuvhu is always a ruddy brown colour such as might be achieved by mixing cans of tomato soup with cans of chicken soup. There was an enormous crocodile lying directly opposite us, not, as one would expect, by the water’s edge but high up on the bank under some trees. I had a feeling some unsuspecting animal was in for a nasty surprise.

On the way back to Punda Maria, we took the shortcut via Klopperfontein Dam, another place which can throw up some unexpected treats even though the area around the dam has been grazed as smooth as a billiard board. Sure enough, we were rewarded with a wonderful sighting of a Painted Snipe snooping around in the shallows of the nearby stream.

It was getting on for late afternoon by now. Ken consulted Emily, his prissy, admonishing Satnav, and worked out how far we had to go and what time we had to do it in. What neither factored into their calculations was our old nemesis, the elephant.

The first one, which we encountered just after Klopperfontein, kept us waiting for ages, while it feasted on the side of the road, before moving off into the surrounding bush. A little later we passed him siphoning water by the trunk load out of the top of a reservoir.

We ran in to the second one on the home stretch with the hills around Punda Maria in plain sight. Although this bull appeared much more amiable then the one who had chased us down the mountain in Marakele, he had obviously decided he held all the rights to this road.

The whole thing quickly degenerated into a stage farce. We kept reversing and reversing and he kept trundling on towards us. I suspect he was headed for his evening sundowner at the same reservoir where the other elephant was sloshing water around.

One of us had to blink and we did so first. Muttering angrily to ourselves about the beast’s poor road etiquette, we turned around and headed back to the tar and took the much longer route home to Punda Maria.

In Kruger, as in other parks, you are not supposed to arrive in camp after dark, which we now did, finding the gate locked on us. Fortunately, the guard was still at his post but Ken had to use all his silky skills as a sports writer and commentator to try to convince him it wasn’t really our fault. I am not sure he bought our explanation, but he let us through without imposing a fine.

So we drove into camp feeling like a pair of naughty schoolboys who had just been caught bunking …

But we were not done yet. We arrived to a scene of utter devastation – in our absence a troop of baboons had ransacked the place, flattening my tent, breaking its poles and ripping gaping holes in the fly-sheet (even though there was nothing inside but my bedding and clothes), as well as scattering our possessions far and wide.

To tell you the truth I was getting seriously tired of this. I had just bought the tent to replace the one that got ripped by monkeys in Mapungubwe on my last trip which, in turn, I had bought to replace the one that had suffered a similar fate at the hands of baboons when I attended a wedding in De Hoop Nature Reserve in the Western Cape. At the rate I was getting through tents, it would have been cheaper to have just booked into a luxury lodge!

I am not sure what one does about this menace. The problem is both monkeys and baboons have become habituated to both human beings and human beings’ food.

We did discover afterwards that there was supposed to be a guard on duty to stop these opportunistic raids but, even though the campsite was virtually booked out, he had decided to take the Sunday off …

I was still sulking about my poor tent the next morning when we drove out of the gate, destination Mapungubwe. There to wish us on our way was the scruffiest Ground Hornbill I have ever seen. It flew up into a tree from where it regarded us quizzically through its girlishly-long eyelashes.

For some reason the sight of that lugubrious bird, peering around its branch, cheered me up no end. It made me realise that on the Richter Scale of Travel Disasters we had got off relatively lightly compared to what other great explorers, like David Livingstone or Scott’s Antarctic expedition, had been forced to endure…

 

 

ANTHONY STIDOLPH

Bavuma wants to open with McCullum, not copy him 0

Posted on October 09, 2017 by Ken

 

Temba Bavuma would love to open the batting alongside Brendon McCullum in the T20 Global League for the Joburg Giants, but as far as copying the Kiwi’s swashbuckling style goes, that’s not how South Africa’s gutsy middle-order Test batsman goes about his cricket.

Big-hitting marquee players like McCullum, Chris Gayle, AB de Villiers and David Miller will be amongst the star attractions when the league gets underway on November 3, but a team’s success is often decided by how well the batsmen around those stars set up the game for them. Bavuma is able to score boundaries with ‘normal’ cricket shots and is very good at rotating the strike.

“One must understand that there are 11 positions in a cricket team and not all cricketers play the same way, they all bring their own thing to the side. You get the batsmen with x-factor who can clear the boundaries, but then you have the other guys who create the foundation for those batsmen to come in and hit the ball.

“I think that’s the role I’ll play for the Joburg Giants, not trying to emulate Brendon but do what I do, which will allow him and Colin Ingram and Chris Jonker to bat effectively as well. In terms of T20 cricket, I’ve always seen myself as a middle-order batsman and I’ve been relatively successful at that, but I’ll probably play a role up front for the Giants, looking at who we’ve signed.

“I will embrace that and welcome the opportunity because as a batsman you want to be near the top in T20 so that you can bat for the bulk of the overs. I do feel I have the necessary skills to open the batting, but I won’t change my game, I’ll just do what has served me well in the domestic game,” Bavuma said at the Wanderers on Wednesday.

Bavuma is now a Cape Cobras player, but the Joburg Giants have signed him and another local darling in Kagiso Rabada to ensure the people of Johannesburg get behind their team.

“I was born in Cape Town, but everything in terms of cricket happened for me in Johannesburg, so it has a large part of my heart. It will be a massive pleasure to once again represent the people of Johannesburg,” Bavuma said.

https://citizen.co.za/sport/south-africa-sport/sa-cricket-sport/1634361/temba-bavuma-will-stay-true-to-himself-in-t20-frenzy/

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    John 14:20 – “On that day you will realise that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.”

    All the effort and striving in the world, all the good works and great sacrifices, will not help you to become like Christ unless the presence of the living Christ is to be found in your heart and mind.

    Jesus needs to be the source, and not our own strength, that enables us to grow spiritually in strength, beauty and truth.

    Unless the presence of Christ is a living reality in your heart, you will not be able to reflect his personality in your life.

    You need an intensely personal, more intimate relationship with Christ, in which you allow him to reveal himself through your life.

     

     



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