Ken Borland

The independent directors on Cricket South Africa’s board have not always furthered the best interests of the game in this country, but hopefully this time it will be different as nominations for those positions close on Friday.

The Interim Board currently in place is trying its utmost to ensure that the governance scandals that have rocked Cricket South Africa in recent years never happen again and those efforts centre around the independent directors. The Memorandum of Incorporation they are developing for CSA has two non-negotiable aspects that will empower those independent directors, according to one of the Interim Board members.

Firstly, the new board that will come into place in mid-April will comprise a majority of independent directors and, secondly, the chairman of the board must be an independent director as well. There will now be a clear split between the board and the Members Council, which comprises the provincial presidents.

The Members Council will elect a president who may sit on the board, but they will not be the chairman.

While the Interim Board are looking for “people of integrity and substance who are also cricket people”, the quality of the new independent directors will only be as good as the nominations received. Which is why the current board are anxiously awaiting Friday and hoping their advert on CSA’s website [https://cricket.co.za/item/336/Careers] draws some standout applicants.

What is also crucial is the quality of the nominations committee that will sift through the candidates and this has apparently been another area in which the Interim Board are ensuring they get the right people.

While acting CEO Pholetsi Moseki is doing a good job, the new board will also have to find a permanent CEO who can drive CSA’s renaissance as well as having standing at International Cricket Council level. The independent directors will drive that process.

As the Currie Cup approaches what will hopefully be a thrilling end, there have been some apocalyptic comments about the poor quality of the rugby and how South Africa are allegedly once again miles behind the rest of the world.

People going on about the end of the world being nigh should generally be treated with some scepticism and it was good to hear Director of Rugby Rassie Erasmus provide some much-needed perspective this week. In case anyone has forgotten, our Currie Cup teams are trying to play rugby in the middle of a global pandemic.

Obviously the major focus is to ensure nobody contracts the virus, which means there is regular testing being done on the players. Covid tests are not particularly pleasant, but the effects of this pandemic do not end there.

While Covid has disrupted the lifestyles of so many, it has had a terrible effect on the structured preparation rugby players have become used to in the professional era. According to Erasmus, rugby teams normally spend 280-300 minutes training together in the week before a game. But due to Covid protocols, that figure has now dropped to less than half of that.

That’s because after a match on a Saturday, teams can only do their Covid tests on Tuesday morning, because 48 hours have to pass before testing, otherwise contact tracing would have to be done in terms of who had too much physical contact during the last match. That means teams cannot train on a Monday in case anyone is positive and spreads the virus through the squad.

The results are only returned on the Tuesday night, which means all the scrum, maul and breakdown work has to be done on the Wednesday. A team could train on the Thursday, but that’s two days before the game and coaches and conditioning experts often are a bit wary of doing that so close to a match.

Captain’s runs on a Friday are now also mostly a thing of the past. When one adds in the effect of teams only being selected in the second half of the week, and the absence of coaches and players from week-to-week due to positive tests, it is clear there has been an awfully disruptive effect on the preparations of teams.

Players who do test positive return to action via a detailed nine-day quarantine period and then, once they return a negative test, a return-to-play protocol that measures the effect of the virus on the body through tests on the heart, lungs and other vital organs. It works out to be about 16 days – the equivalent of two matches – away from the game.

And even players or coaches who test negative, but are deemed to be close contacts of someone who has the virus, have to quarantine for 10 days.

These players and coaches, who have all taken pay cuts as well, are at the vanguard of keeping the South African game afloat in far from ideal circumstances. They deserve our thanks and appreciation, not our opprobrium.

With competing in Europe on the horizon, it really is a brave new world in so many ways for our rugby players. They will need our support.

They are taking the hits on and off the field, it’s midsummer when they have never been playing before, and the good thing one can say about the Currie Cup this year is that it’s still as uncompromising as ever.

Saturday’s matches between the Bulls and Lions at Loftus Versfeld, and Western Province and the Sharks at Newlands, might not be thrilling in terms of dazzling running rugby, but for sheer intensity alone they will hopefully be enthralling to watch.

Proteas coach Mark Boucher says the team has found a new vision and identity for themselves and also a new way of playing that will hopefully bring greater success as a rebuilding side looks to regain their glory days.

The South African cricket team’s Culture Camp at Skukuza last month not only dealt with wrongs of the past, especially those that involved racial discrimination, but also plotted a way ahead for the future. #ProteaFire, the mantra of the team that went to number one in all three formats with Boucher as a player, has now officially been extinguished, replaced by three watchwords: Belonging; Empathy; Respect.

“One of the biggest changes came in terms of #ProteaFire, which gave us direction and the values to become the number one side, especially when under pressure. But none of those guys are playing anymore and we have outgrown that, it’s an outdated identity. Maybe it became too commercialised, it ended up just being on paper and the guys no longer live it.

“There are more cultures in the team now and it was time those came through. It’s important for a new team to create a new identity and that’s exactly what we got – a new set of values. It will start with how we play and the players chose the same route that myself and Enoch Nkwe [assistant coach] wanted, everything aligned without us really trying. It’s also about how new guys coming into the team must feel and management did not choose the vision, the players did,” Boucher said in an audio interview released by Cricket South Africa on Monday.

Boucher said the Culture Camp also gave the larger group of players from which the Proteas will draw the opportunity to talk about their pet peeves and he found the revelations to be eye-opening.

“We all come from different backgrounds and have been brought up in different ways, and we must understand our shortfalls in the past. We can’t turn a blind eye, we must acknowledge them, that’s empathy, which is a big word for us. We need to use our four or five different cultures to our advantage and I came out of the camp with a completely different understanding.

“I educated myself, I found it quite fascinating, things I have never thought about before. The camp opened my eyes in a massive way and I would encourage people to get out there and try and understand the feelings of different races. Now the best thing for the game would be for our biggest assets – the players – to be able to take over the headlines for good things, let the game do the talking rather than the other things that have been hogging the headlines,” Boucher said.

If the South African Rugby Union were a kid, based on their 2016 performance they would be the one who failed to pass their grade and has to repeat the year, hopefully being shamed into harder work and improvement by the embarrassment of sitting in a class with a bunch of people a year younger than you.

Unfortunately, if I was their teacher in that school, I would be forced to conclude already at this early stage of the year that Saru are doomed to fail again because they are simply repeating the same mistakes.

We are two weeks away from the start of Super Rugby and we still don’t know yet whether Allister Coetzee will continue in his post as Springbok coach. If he does – and that looks likely given how tardy Saru have once again been in sorting out their most important appointment (apart from arguably the CEO, who has done another of his disappearing tricks) – then Coetzee will once again find his planning set back by an administration that seems intent on tying one hand behind his back.

The contracts are apparently in place and the official announcement is supposed to be made in the next week, but we’ve heard that line before.

There is another vital appointment that Saru is also dragging its feet over and one that just creates enormous uncertainty amongst the best junior talent in this country and their parents, many of whom are probably sitting on offers from overseas.

Dawie Theron finished his tenure as national U20 coach in June and a replacement has still not been named. There is a great candidate – both in terms of the success he has achieved with young rugby players and the tremendous transformation message it would send – sitting in Potchefstroom by the name of Jonathan Mokuena, previously a manager of the Junior Springboks side, a winner of the Varsity Cup and a successful coach of the Leopards senior team.

But instead there are strong suggestions Abe Davids, the brother of Saru vice-president Francois Davids, is being lined up for the job.

Former traffic cop Francois Davids is also the president of Boland rugby, the union which suspended Abe Davids in 2014 for faking his coaching qualifications, and has been accused of such nepotism by the clubs in the area that the administration was called the “House of Davids”.

The only good news coming out of Saru lately  is that they have invested in getting Brendan Venter back involved with the Springboks. With him and Franco Smith, working with Matt Proudfoot and Johann van Graan, Coetzee will finally have back-up staff worthy of the Springboks.

Of course the name of Rassie Erasmus still pops up from time to time and the former Springbok and director of rugby has put in a lot of time and effort in plotting his coaching career-path. A leading Afrikaans Sunday newspaper seems be the PR company for his ambitions.

While the dithering and politicking carries on in the Saru boardroom, the All Blacks have already held their first camp together and the gap just widens. One would hope the news that the Springboks could be ranked as low as seventh after the next round of Six Nations matches would shock Saru into decisive action, but the wheels of their bureaucracy turn with the speed of a sloth.