Ken Borland

KHOLWANE, Eswatini – Jaco Prinsloo is an avid fisherman and his ‘catch’ on the par-fives at the Nkonyeni Lodge and Golf Estate was the major reason why he leads the FNB Eswatini Nkonyeni Challenge after the first round on Thursday.

If Prinsloo was a birdwatcher then he would have been equally thrilled with the two eagles and two birdies he bagged on the four par-fives on the bushveld golf course next to the Usutu River, making up the bulk of his gains in a seven-under-par 65 that left him top of the pile, two strokes ahead of Herman Loubser.

Prinsloo eagled the eighth and 15^th holes, while also collecting birdie fours on the fourth and 13^th holes. The 32-year-old’s other birdies came on the third and ninth holes, and he dropped just one shot, on the par-four fifth.

“I hit the ball pretty good today,” Prinsloo said. “I hit it really close for my one eagle and made a decent putt for the other. It was a case of really good putting today and good hitting, there were a couple of very good shots.

“The tour had a break of more than a month so it’s been a while since I played competitively and these are not the fastest greens, different to what we’re used to compared to winter in Johannesburg.

“It’s a new course for us because we’re used to playing at the Royal Swazi Sun, but Nkonyeni is an absolute beauty, really challenging but fun in the bushveld,” Prinsloo said.

Prinsloo is enjoying a solid season and is 15^th on the Luno Order of Merit, saying he feels he is “moving in the right direction” and needs to “keep doing what I’m doing”.

If the Serengeti Golf and Wildlife Estate representative can back up his 65 over the next two rounds then he will keep his challengers in the R1 million event mum.

Modderfontein’s Loubser is foremost among those, a marvellous run of four successive birdies around the turn leading him to a 67.

Ricky Hendler and young Kyle McClatchie are a stroke further back on four-under, while Jovan Rebula, Lyle Rowe, Clinton Grobler and CJ du Plessis are all on three-under-par.

The Proteas’ resident ginger, Heinrich Klaasen, deeply annoyed the English team, especially his fellow red-haired opponents, with his gamesmanship in the second ODI at Old Trafford on Friday night, but the 30-year-old batsman afterwards brushed off the incident as “fun and games on the field”.

South Africa had plummeted to 39 for five after 10 of their 29 overs when Klaasen stopped play to complain about his vision of the ball being disturbed by white sheeting at the bottom of the black sightscreen. Initially the umpires battled to understand what he was complaining about, with England getting more and more frantic for play to resume as the drizzle that was falling was only getting heavier.

By this stage, the Proteas were already badly behind in the contest, needing 164 runs in 19 overs with the last recognised pair of batsmen together at the crease. Their best hope seemed to be for the match to be rained off before they had faced 20 overs, in which case there would be no result.

It took a few minutes for the penny to drop that the ground staff had shifted the boundary boards aside in order to allow them to bring the covers on quickly if necessary, thereby exposing the white sheeting which Klaasen alleged made the white ball difficult to see.

The wicketkeeper/batsman afterwards admitted that he actually had no problems sighting the ball but he was just trying to delay play. England were boiling over with frustration and Klaasen sparked something of a Ginger War as Jonny Bairstow fumed at the batsman and the umpires, and captain Jos Buttler, who has a hint of reddish-brown hair himself, stomped around.

“It was zero percent about the ball disappearing,” Klaasen admitted. “It was starting to rain harder and I was just trying to delay matters. I hoped the umpires would take us off the field before the 20 overs, but unfortunately they didn’t.

“It was just some old-school tricks. The England boys didn’t like it and I knew the abuse would come. I was just trying to upset their game a bit, I thought it couldn’t do us any harm.

“It frustrated a lot of them, but we didn’t come off in the end. What they said to me didn’t bother me at all, it was just fun and games on the field, and off the field hopefully we can still have a beer after the next game. It’s easy for me to keep that sort of thing on the field,” Klaasen said.

England had the last laugh though as South Africa were skittled for a dismal 83 all out and left to mourn a massive 118-run defeat, with paceman David Willey saying “I’m thinking Mother Cricket came around”.

Life in France is good (although he complained the biltong is not the same as at home) judging by the sparkle in Trevor Nyakane’s eye and his lean and mean look at the Springbok hotel in Pretoria on Thursday.

The former Bulls prop joined Racing 92 at the beginning of the year and will be a useful source of information on next year’s Rugby World Cup hosts. Nyakane picked up an injury towards the end of the French season which prevented him from playing in Racing’s unsuccessful Champions Cup semi-final and Top 14 quarterfinal.

But the 33-year-old was thrilled to be able to watch the charge of the South African teams in the United Rugby Championship.

“Being in France has given me a different perspective on rugby, and I’ll be giving that information to the Springbok team. It’s lovely coming back, I feel at home, you can get biltong over there but it’s not the same!

“I was really amazed watching the URC. At the start of the competition, you had to scroll to the second page of the log to find any of the South African teams, and then we ended up with three teams in the playoffs!

“Racing play Champions Cup rugby against Leinster, so we know what they are capable of and it was really amazing for the Bulls to go there and win. It shows that there are only greener pastures for our teams,” Nyakane said.

The versatile frontranker’s focus is now on the Tests against Wales and he says the never-say-die attitude of Wayne Pivac’s side is their strongest attribute.

“Wales have a lot of experience and they never let go. Some teams you can just beat into submission, but Wales keep coming until the final whistle blows.

“They will try and impose themselves in the game, but as South Africans we are never shy of a challenge,” Nyakane said.

While Thursday’s function was to introduce the new Springbok squad to the media, who coach Jacques Nienaber described as the brokers between the team and the fans/sponsors, who he said were ultimately their employers, it was unsurprising that the players were more excited about the prospect of playing in full stadiums again.

“We’ve really missed the fans, they mean a lot to us,” Nyakane said. “We went through the Lions tour last year without any crowds, it was a good tour but we really missed the guys out there keying us up.

“I would urge all fans to purchase tickets and come out and support us, and I can assure them we will give of our best.”

Batsmen in the current IPL have bravely gone where no batters have gone before in hitting more than one-thousand sixes in the current competition, and Proteas captain Temba Bavuma is hoping his batsmen can play with similar freedom when South Africa play a T20 series in India next month.

The one-thousand sixes barrier was broken for the first time in the IPL in the final league stage match of 2022 on May 22, the previous most maximums in a season being the 872 scored in 2018.

“I’ve really enjoyed being off from cricket for the last four weeks, so I have not watched all the IPL, but the one thing I have seen is that there have been a lot more sixes hit – more than a thousand,” Bavuma said at a Castle Lager launch in Tembisa on Wednesday.

“As a bowler, you’re probably scared to see that, but you’re smiling as a batsman. It means our bowlers will need to be a lot smarter, but for the batsmen, the pitches are good.

“Our batsmen can really go out and express themselves. Our game doesn’t need to change too much, but to have power-hitters like David Miller and Tristan Stubbs teaming up together in the middle would be incredible.

“They could be a potent partnership. David smashed the lights out yesterday to get Gujarat Titans in the final, Quinton de Kock bashed it around the other night and Kagiso Rabada has been brilliant as well,” Bavuma said.

While Stubbs will be fighting with the likes of Heinrich Klaasen and Reeza Hendricks for the one batting spot that could be open, Bavuma is backing the 21-year-old to make his mark on his first call-up to the Proteas squad.

“It’s nice to see young new faces in the team and we’ve been on the receiving end of Tristan’s batting a number of times at the Lions. We’ll try to make the environment as comfortable as we can for him.

“He’s a young guy so he also has the opportunity to learn a lot from the older guys in the team. He’ll have guys around him to make his transition to international cricket as smooth as possible.

“Hopefully he can soak it all in because international cricket is different to the IPL or domestic T20. Hopefully he can really take his career forward.

“We have a couple of guys in really good form from the IPL, but we expect it to be a tough series. India are always very competitive and we’ve seen some of their guys have a very good IPL as well,” Bavuma said.