Ken Borland

While Neil McKenzie will return to South African cricket as a batting coach, the appointment of Malibongwe Maketa and Shukri Conrad as the chief breeders of talent for the Proteas will arguably have an even greater effect as director of cricket Graeme Smith announced his high performance management team on Thursday.

McKenzie, who played 58 Tests and 64 ODIs for the Proteas, is the new batting lead and while this means he will replace Jacques Kallis as the batting consultant for the national team, his appointment is a full-time one and he will work with batsmen at all levels of the pipeline.

Conrad, as the new SA U19 men’s lead, and Maketa, who is now the full-time South Africa A and National Academy lead, have been given key roles in that pipeline.

Maketa was a Proteas assistant coach from 2017-2019 as well as enjoying a successful time in charge of the Eastern Cape Warriors, so the 39-year-old knows exactly what is required for talented cricketers to progress through the system. He told The Citizen on Thursday that he sees himself as the go-between for the Proteas management and the franchise coaches.

“They are two very important roles and fortunately I’ll have a lot of highly qualified coaches around me as we try to prepare cricketers for both the franchises and the Proteas. The Academy is there to empower the players with skills and I will be assisting them with their game-plans and execution. It’s great to be back in a full-time role with Cricket South Africa.

“I’ll be looking to assist Mark Boucher and Enoch Nkwe in creating a bigger base for the Proteas and my contract runs concurrently with their’s. It’s also about monitoring and identifying talent and lending a hand to the franchise coaches, making sure we are all speaking the same language, from Graeme, Mark and Enoch to the franchises. I intend to get my hands dirty and throw lots of balls,” Maketa said.

Conrad, a vastly-experienced coach who has been heading up the National Academy, will now take over the crucial U19 programme.

“I’ve loved every minute of it at the academy and I know what is required to get to those levels as I now get involved earlier in the pipeline. The U19s are a great challenge because it is such an important stage in development and South African cricket as a whole. The challenge is to ensure we give every young cricketer every opportunity to play and perform.

“Excellence in coaching is critical at provincial and school level, and schools have a massive role to play. I would like to work together with them, private coaches and the Hubs and RPC coaches because we have been in our silos for far too long. Plus we have a scouting system and a wonderful database run by John Bailey and Niels Momberg to ensure nobody falls through the cracks,” Conrad said.

Other appointments confirmed on Thursday were those of Eddie Khoza as the Acting Head of Cricket Pathways, Vincent Barnes as the High-Performance Bowling Lead, Dinesha Devnarain as the Women’s SA U19 and National Academy Head Coach, and Dr Shuaib Manjra as the Chief Medical Officer. Follwing the rather dilly stink created over the appointment of certain consultants, these announcements should be sweet-smelling for the majority of SA cricket fans. They all have considerable amounts to add to the high performance programme.

Cricket South Africa’s decision to postpone their AGM until they first have clarity on what exactly is contained in the forensic reports they have commissioned was generally received as a rare bit of good news for the embattled organisation on Tuesday.

CSA were meant to stage their AGM on Saturday with a new president and several other directors meant to be elected, but that has now been put off indefinitely with the organisation saying they needed to first undergo a governance and structural review based on the recommendations of both the Fundudzi forensic report commissioned when former CEO Thabang Moroe was suspended and also the Nicholson Commission of Inquiry that dates all the way back to 2012 and related to the Gerald Majola bonus scandal.

Moroe was fired last week, with Kugandrie Govender appointed acting CEO, Jacques Faul having stood down from that temporary position the week before.

Most importantly, the postponement means the Members Council have for the first time stood united and flexed their muscle in bringing the Board to order and, crucially, they will now get to see the forensic report into Moroe which is believed to also implicate several Board members in misgovernance. The CSA Board initially refused to release the report to the Members Council, comprising the 14 provincial affiliates, even though they had commissioned the inquiry, and then said they had to peruse it at the Bowman Gilfillan legal offices, only after signing a non-disclosure agreement.

“It’s a win, definitely. It means we can get our house 100% in order before the AGM, it gives us more time to make sure of that. And we are optimistic that we will get access to the forensic report with conditions that won’t hamper us. This has come about because of pressure from the Members Council, who have now shown they have teeth. The Board now seems to be seeking our advice on things like the Memorandum of Incorporation [which formalises the governance structure of CSA],”  a Members Council representative told The Citizen on Tuesday, under promise of anonymity because acting president Beresford Williams has decreed that only he is allowed to speak to the media.

“It’s a positive, it gives us time to clear up our issues, although obviously the problem of the CEO [Moroe] won’t be amongst them because that’s probably going to be decided by a court case. But in terms of the Memorandum of Incorporation, the postponement gives the Members Council a clear opportunity to review that and they will also be able to see the forensic report, the Board is just crafting conditions around that,” another Members Council administrator said.

With South African cricket lurching through almost daily crises in recent times, both the Proteas men’s and women’s sides, through their players’ union SACA, issued a statement on Tuesday calling for CSA to put the good of the game as a whole first.

“As Proteas players, both men and women, we are concerned about the future of our game. At Board and operational level, CSA has lurched from crisis to crisis over the past year. Issues such as suspensions, dismissals, resignations, forensic audits, confidential leaks, litigation and financial mismanagement have dominated the cricket headlines. This is happening at a time when we are having challenging conversations about transformation, and in an environment where the financial viability of the game is under major threat.  
“High standards are expected of us as players. To succeed as Proteas teams, we know we have to put aside personal differences and work together. We require the same of our administrators. Politics and self-interest appear to trump cricket imperatives and good governance. Decisions must be made that are in the best interests of cricket, failing which the game we love may be irreparably damaged in this country. The Proteas teams must be strong, the domestic structure must be strong, and the transformation pipeline must be strong – we demand that this be the focus of the CSA Board and operational team.
“The CSA AGM scheduled for 5 September has now been postponed. This may be the last chance we have to change direction and save the game. As Proteas we demand that all stakeholders heed our sincere plea,” the statement read.

The Black Lives Matter logo might not be printed on their playing shirts when cricket returns on Saturday with the Solidarity Cup three-team event in Centurion, but leading White Proteas have now joined the movement and publicly expressed their support for the anti-racism drive.

Cricket South Africa director of cricket Graeme Smith has indicated that the playing shirts had already been printed, for an event that was originally meant to take place on June 27, when the cricketing world began to embrace the Black Lives Matter movement.

Nevertheless, when former Proteas captain Faf du Plessis “takes the knee” on Saturday along with other White players like Rassie van der Dussen, Dwaine Pretorius and Anrich Nortje, it will be a powerful moment of solidarity with Lungi Ngidi and the other Black players who have spoken out in support of BLM.

Du Plessis has even taken matters further by apologising for his comment that the team “don’t see colour” when Temba Bavuma was left out of the Newlands Test against England at the start of the year.

“I surrender my opinions and take the knee as an intercessor. I acknowledge that South Africa is still hugely divided by racism and it is my personal responsibility to do my best to empathise, hear the stories, learn and then be part of the solution with my thoughts, words and actions. I have gotten it wrong before. Good intentions were failed by a lack of perspective when I said on a platform that I don’t see colour. In my ignorance I silenced the struggles of others by placing my own view on it.

“A race problem is a human race problem, if one part of the body hurts, we all stop, we empathise, we get perspective, we learn and then we tend to the hurting part of the body. So I am saying that all lives don’t matter UNTIL Black lives matter. I’m speaking up now, because if I wait to be perfect, I never will. I want to leave a legacy of empathy,” Du Plessis said in an Instagram post on Friday.

Van der Dussen and Pretorius, who both play for the Central Gauteng Lions and have had to wait a long time to kickstart their international careers, said they too support BLM.

“I will be proudly supporting the BLM movement and I will be taking a knee on Saturday. I honestly and wholeheartedly believe it’s the right thing to do. I also believe taking the knee is only the start. To me the BLM movement stands for the most basic right all people across the world deserve and that is the right to not be judged or segmented because of his/her colour, but rather for WHO they are.

“It’s not a movement that says Black lives are MORE important than any other colour. It’s my brother from another mother asking me please see me for WHO I am. Don’t persecute me because of my skin colour. Give me the same benefit of the doubt you would give someone with the same colour as you. Yes, the movement says ‘Black’, but I believe it’s relevant to any colour and race,” Pretorius said on Facebook.

Van der Dussen was asked on Twitter by journalist Max du Preez where he and several other Proteas stood on BLM, and the 31-year-old batsman tweeted in Afrikaans: “I support BLM, I’m against murder, I’m against all murders: physical, character and cultural murders. I support equal opportunities for all. Just because I support BLM does not mean I support violence or Marxism, so I refuse to be labelled by people.”

The fact that almost all of them have international playing experience was first and foremost in fast bowler Lutho Sipamla’s mind this week when he spoke about the effect the Proteas coaching staff have had on his own fledgling career for South Africa.

Since making his Proteas debut in a T20 against Pakistan at the Wanderers in February last year, the 22-year-old Sipamla has played four ODIs and five T20 Internationals. For all his inexperience, he has been quick to recognise the value of all the experience around him.

“Guys like Charl Langeveldt, Mark Boucher, Jacques Kallis and Justin Ontong have walked the talk, they know what it takes to be a good international cricketer. It’s awesome to have them as coaches because they have been in our shoes and they have done it all before. So they can relate to what we are going through because they’ve experienced it themselves.

“Someone like Charl, when it comes to bowling at the death, he’s had to defend six or seven runs to win the game and done that. So he knows the processes involved, he’s been successful and he passes that on to the bowlers,” Sipamla said.

Bowling coach Langeveldt played 72 ODIs, but the respect he is held in by local cricketers suggests he should have played many more; head coach Boucher played 147 Tests and 295 ODIs, batting consultant Kallis is South Africa’s most-capped player ever with 166 Test and 328 ODI appearances, and fielding coach Ontong was unfortunate to play just two Tests, 14 ODIs and 28 T20 Internationals.

Last year was a pretty terrible one for the Proteas, but there were signs of the tide starting to turn when they whitewashed a powerful Australian side 3-0 in the ODI series in February/March.

“It was a great experience making my debut in the limited-overs format and it was a really good win over Australia, a wonderful experience and a great time for me. We had a very young squad but we all worked together towards our goal and gelled nicely. We all knew what we had to do, everyone knew their roles and we were able to execute.

“In that campaign we all grew as individuals and players, and it was something special to be part of it. And now we’ve had a long wait to play again and I’m really excited just to get back to practice and crafting my skills again. As my Dad always tells me when I’m having a tough time, I must just make sure I keep working hard and make sure I’m still doing all the right things,” Sipamla said.