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Ken Borland



Keeping expanded squad keen and still ensuring success a balancing act for Everitt 0

Posted on October 18, 2021 by Ken

Keeping an expanded squad keen with regular game-time and still ensuring success on the field is a balancing act Sean Everitt has mostly succeeded with during his tenure as Sharks coach and on Thursday he named another eight changes to his squad for Saturday’s United Rugby Championship match against the Cardiff Blues at the Arms Park.

It is the last fixture in what has been a long and daunting first foray into Europe, with injuries to wings Yaw Penxe and Thaakir Abrahams, and the return home of scrumhalf Sanele Nohamba due to a family bereavement, complicating matters. But a strong starting line-up has still been named, and the likes of prop Wiehahn Herbst, lock Reniel Hugo and scrumhalf Tian Meyer will get some opportunity off the bench.

“On a four-week tour it’s important to give as many guys as possible an opportunity,” Everitt said on Thursday. “We’ve used 33 out of the 34 players with us here without weakening the team. But it’s important to get the balance right.

“You need to be strategic in mixing it up, for example when Boeta Chamberlain started at flyhalf we paired him with Ruan Pienaar, so he had experience around him.

“It has certainly kept the players motivated and I am quite comfortable that they can all cope at this level. So there are a couple of rotational changes this week with captain Phepsi Buthelezi having rested lasted week.

“There are also a couple of injuries and unfortunately Thaakir has a significant injury. He has gone to have scans at home and will have to see a surgeon,” Everitt said.

Centre Rynhardt Jonker is the unfortunate lone player who has not seen any action on tour, but at 21-years-old, just travelling and training with the team would have been a great experience and his time will come.

Having secured the morale-boosting win last weekend over the Ospreys, Everitt is confident that there will be no sliding of standards in their last game in the United Kingdom before flying home.

“The win definitely did us good from a psychological point of view and the guys are in a really good space and excited for the Cardiff game.

“The win has certainly lifted morale and the team is really motivated to win two out of four games, although it has been a long tour. We never set a goal for the tour, but the coaches spoke about getting 8-12 points.

“If we can get two wins then that would be a good tour. That was normally the benchmark on Super Rugby tours that were four weeks long. The third week on tour was always challenging, but we got the win last weekend,” Everitt said.

Sharks teamCurwin Bosch, Marnus Potgieter, Jeremy Ward, Murray Koster, Anthony Volmink, Boeta Chamberlain, Ruan Pienaar, Phepsi Buthelezi (Capt), Henco Venter, Dylan Richardson, Hyron Andrews, Ruben van Heerden, Thomas du Toit (v/c), Kerron van Vuuren, Ntuthuko Mchunu. Bench: Dan Jooste, Khwezi Mona, Wiehahn Herbst, Reniel Hugo, Gerbrandt Grobler, James Venter, Tian Meyer, Werner Kok.

Habana arrows in on tech solution for sportspeople 0

Posted on June 08, 2020 by Ken

Blistering pace and a keen nose for the tryline meant Bryan Habana was like an arrow zeroing in on its target when it came to try-scoring and the Springbok wing holds the records for the World Cup, Tri-Nations/Rugby Championship, the Springboks and for South Africans in SuperRugby. It is heartening to see the 36-year-old show the same acumen now that he has retired and is in the business world.

A graduate of the Toulouse business school, Habana is now the co-founder of Retroviral, a digital sports marketing agency with a strong emphasis on tech. It’s a career move which probably has its roots back in the early 2000s when he signed up for a BSc IT degree at the then Rand Afrikaans University. But then rugby got in the way.

The Covid-19 pandemic has drastically affected everyone’s lifestyles and is likely to force structural adjustments to the economy of just about everything. Sport has been especially hard hit with the global sports industry now projected to face losses of $62 billion.

The Lockdown has also provided much food for thought for entrepreneurs and, typical of the sharp minds of Habana, Mike Sharman and Ben Karpinski, the founders of Retroviral, they have come up with a great new idea that will assist the wellbeing of sportsmen and women as they look to navigate these tumultuous times.

MatchKit.co is a mobile tech platform that allows athletes to build their own website. And not those starchy looking ones that are never updated, have lots of photos that take forever to load and are low on substance.

Within five minutes, sports stars can build themselves a website that highlights their sponsors, automatically integrates into all the big social media channels and provides detailed stats of their engagements on those platforms, has a plug-and-play, secure e-commerce store that will enable them to sell anything from branded merchandise to video or audio shoutouts, and a portal that will enable people to donate to their foundation or favourite charity.

It has often proven a stiff task for sportspeople to promote themselves better, they tend to forget certain sponsors or, in many cases, not even have an Online presence. MatchKit.co certainly appears to be able to overcome these problems.

“I’m extremely excited, MatchKit will add tangible value to athletes and allow them to easily commercialise their brands around the world. I know I was all over the place after our 2007 World Cup win, but MatchKit now allows the athlete to control their commercial rights, it empowers them, while showcasing their sponsors.

“It came about after bouncing ideas off a South African venture capitalist who’s now in the United States and it has a simple set-up. You look at sportspeople Online and not even 10-15% will have their agent’s details there. What if corporates want to engage with them? What happens if they change their agent?” Habana said at the launch this week.

●●●●●●●

The great news to come out of the cricketing world in the last week is that the West Indies tour of England looks set to go ahead with the Caribbean squad arriving on Tuesday to quarantine ahead of a three-Test series that will start on July 8. The matches will be played behind closed doors in a bio-secure environment, with the first Test being held in Southampton, followed by two matches at Old Trafford, starting on July 16 and July 24 respectively.

That means the series will end on July 28. South Africa were scheduled to have played their first Test in the West Indies from July 23-27, with the second meant to start on July 31. With a lucrative T20 series against India lined up for the end of August, it now seems likely the Proteas will only meet the West Indians in September and there is still no clarity on whether that series will take place in the Caribbean or in South Africa, or even be moved to a neutral venue like England. The tour of the West Indies was originally meant to be of just over a month’s duration, so it doesn’t look possible to cram in the two Tests and five T20s that were meant to be played even if the Men in Maroon plant themselves in the UK and the Proteas fly over there and quarantine in the second half of July.

Immelman banking on Els’ foundation & injection of youth to make Internationals more of a threat 0

Posted on April 09, 2020 by Ken

New Presidents Cup Internationals team captain Trevor Immelman is keen to build on the foundation laid by Ernie Els and has warned that his side will have a lot of exciting youngsters providing great depth as they look to end the eight-match winning streak of the United States.

Els led the Internationals to one of their best ever showings in December as they were edged out 16-14 at Royal Melbourne Golf Club by the Americans, captained by Tiger Woods. Immelman is the youngest ever captain to be appointed – he will be 41 when the Presidents Cup is played again in September 2021 at Quail Hollow, beating the mark set by Woods, who was coming to the end of his 44th year in December.

And Immelman is banking on an injection of youth to make the International team even more competitive next year.

“I was part of Ernie’s team for the last Presidents Cup and I will try and continue his legacy and I really look forward to building on the platform he created. It’s an amazing honour to follow in the footsteps of Ernie Els and Gary Player as the Internationals captain. They have both been mentors and great friends of mine, whose advice I have relied on through my life.

“In the last two years we’ve had a number of youngsters step up as some of the best golfers in the world. We have a lot of different players starting to play really well, guys who were on the fringes of the team last time around. We had a group of 12 in Melbourne and now I can cast a bigger net and create a group of 30 to 40 golfers, and start to get the camaraderie going,” Immelman told OFM radio’s Morgan Piek this week.

The 2008 Masters (again beating Woods) and two-time SA Open champion mentioned players such as Koreans Sungjae Im and Byeong Hun-An, Cameron Smith, Jazz Janewattananond, Pebble Beach winner Nick Taylor and Corey Conners as being amongst the young talent that is making him excited about being the seventh Internationals captain.

Not that the Cape Town-born Immelman is discounting a healthy contingent of his countrymen making the cut in 2021.

“There are the more experienced guys I grew up with like Adam Scott and Louis Oosthuizen, but South Africa has such a rich history of golfers performing at the highest level and winning the biggest championships – guys like Charl Schwartzel, who is coming back from injury and showing good form, and Branden Grace, who won the SA Open recently.

“Plus there’s someone like Erik van Rooyen, who has been playing some beautiful golf on the PGA Tour, and Christiaan Bezuidenhout, who is competing against the best in the world and showing what he can do,” Immelman said.

The crude & immoral reasons behind the Lorgat witch-hunt 0

Posted on November 24, 2017 by Ken

 

And so, finally, we know why the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) have been so keen to sideline Haroon Lorgat, and why English and Australian administrators sided with them in agreeing to a witch-hunt that would keep the former International Cricket Council CEO sidelined while those three countries stage a hostile takeover of the game.

 If you’re going to stage a coup that hands almost complete power in cricket to the three greedy pigs of India, England and Australia, using the flimsiest of economic reasons to justify it, then the last person you want in the boardroom is a trained chartered accountant with in-depth knowledge of the ICC and their global events, someone able to see through the efforts to bamboozle with lots of numbers, and able to rally the other nations into rejecting, with the utter contempt it deserves, the crude and immoral proposal to change the ICC’s structure.

While Lorgat’s suspension from ICC activities was ostensibly part of India’s efforts to punish him for not kowtowing to their every whim while he was the global body’s CEO, it has now become clear that the BCCI’s shameful interference in Cricket South Africa affairs was part of a much bigger plan – an evil attempt to seize control of cricket, along with England and Australia. David Becker’s ill-judged letter then provided the perfect ammunition to force Lorgat’s removal from ICC affairs.

While the players – through Fica, their international union – and fans the world over have expressed their dismay at the new low the world’s leading cricket administrators are now proposing, the aptly-named Wally Edwards, the Cricket Australia chairman and one of the three men responsible for drafting the bombshell proposal, expressed his annoyance that anybody has dared to question the bona fides of himself, Narayanaswami Srinivasan of India (the Jabba the Hutt of world cricket) and the odious Giles Clarke of England.

“Traditionally, Cricket Australia does not comment on ICC discussions it is about to have – we talk to other ICC nations across the table rather than via the media. But we were today disappointed to see the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations question whether CA and others have met their fiduciary duties as ICC members,” Edwards harrumphed.

But his feeble protestations cannot hide the fact that three nations are trying to use their current wealth to ensure a monopoly over the game that will only widen the gap between them and the rest of the cricket-playing world; cricket will become like American Football, a game reserved for the few and ignored by the rest of the world.

Which makes it clear that Edwards has not met his fiduciary duties as an ICC director. He and the other two conspirators are proposing something that is patently not in the best interests of the game as a whole, but will rather serve the narrow self-interest of three countries only.

It will take cricket back to the dark days of the Imperial Cricket Conference, where you had to be a member of the British Empire to join and England and Australia both held a veto when it came to voting on anything to do with the game.

It was only in 1993, with the formation of the International Cricket Council, that this stranglehold on the game was broken. One can only hope that when the ICC board meets at the end of this month, the other seven Full Members don’t vote themselves back into slavery again.

And while they are at it, Edwards, Srinivasan and Clarke, a former investment banker, should all be summarily fired as directors and Lorgat should be exonerated of all wrongdoing.

It’s all gone very quiet when it comes to his inquiry, by now the ICC really should have been able to find evidence if there was any unethical behaviour on his part. But then again, the evil triumvirate will have achieved what they set out to do with their spurious allegations if Lorgat is not inside the ICC Board meeting at the end of the month, having already been absent when the restructuring proposal was sprung on the other directors on January 9.

The BCCI have already issued a thinly-veiled threat to boycott ICC events like the World Cup and the World T20 if the Board does not submit to their plan for world domination.

In a statement released on Thursday, the BCCI said it had “authorised the office bearers to enter into agreements with ICC for participating in the ICC events and host ICC events, subject to the proposal being approved in the ICC Board.”

Once India have control of the international cricket schedule, along with England and Australia, there is little doubt that no cricket will be allowed to be played during the IPL, therefore ensuring the newest, least gratifying format of the game takes centre-stage.

Fortunately for cricket fans and the players, there is still hope even if the ICC Board do the unthinkable and sell-out to India, England and Australia.

If the ICC act unconstitutionally, or even if their directors are deemed to have breached the code of conduct and failed in their fiduciary duties to act in the interests of the sport and not their own narrow agendas, then there are stakeholders willing to take the matter all the way to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Perhaps Cricket South Africa should send their independent lead director, Norman Arendse, a fiery, outspoken advocate, to shake things up at the ICC?

The governing body seems to have totally lost sight of the reason for their existence: which is to grow the game, not take it back 100 years.

And the point of the game is fair competition: the idea that India, England and Australia should be exempt from any possible Test relegation is laughable and goes against the very principles of fair play. The last five years suggest all three countries are being incredibly arrogant to presume they will remain strong on the playing field ad infinitum.

But then again the smugness currently coming out of England at their own cleverness in finding a devious way of returning to the top table of world cricket (never mind how shocking the on-field performance has been recently), bugger the rest of the world, suggests fair play is no longer the defining characteristic of cricket.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-01-23-cricket-the-mystery-of-the-lorgat-witch-hunt-unravelled/#.Wh6eSFWWbIU

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    Ephesians 4:15 – “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.”

    “When you become a Christian, you start a new life with new values and fresh objectives. You no longer live to please yourself, but to please God. The greatest purpose in your life will be to serve others. The good deeds that you do for others are a practical expression of your faith.

    “You no longer live for your own pleasure. You must be totally obedient to the will of God.” – Solly Ozrovech, A Shelter From The Storm

    The goal of my life must be to glorify and please the Lord. I need to grow into Christ-likeness!



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