Ken Borland

It’s been an SA20 campaign of some angst for the Pretoria Capitals and their new coach Jonathan Trott, but a change of captain and bringing in a handful of fresh players saw them ease to an assured bonus point victory over the Joburg Super Kings at Centurion on Tuesday night, which will provide a considerable confidence-boost as the playoffs loom.

The Capitals came into this crucial local derby having won just one of their previous seven matches, but two No-Results and a bonus point win meant they weren’t knocked out of contention just yet. But another victory was almost essential and they pulled it off in style, winning by six wickets with fully eight overs to spare.

The triumph was set up in the field after new skipper Kyle Verreynne won the toss and sent Joburg in to bat. The bowlers responded with a superb display of calm discipline – conceding just one leg-bye and one wide as extras epitomised that – and the Capitals were brilliant in the field.

The pressure saw the Super Kings restricted to just 99 for nine in their 20 overs, the lowest SA20 total ever at Centurion.

Two players making their SA20 debuts set the tone with the ball. Australian Thomas Rogers was excellent up front, taking one for 20 in his four overs, while Gideon Peters, from North-West via Border but born in Pretoria, caused great unease in the middle overs with his sheer pace and excellent control. He finished with two for 15 in his four overs, dismissing two of Joburg’s international stars in Devon Conway (9) and Moeen Ali (0). And Peters very much got them out – Conway couldn’t handle the heat from a short delivery and was caught behind, while Moeen was trapped lbw by a searing leg-stump yorker.

The batting line-up also has a fresh look with Will Smeed, Ashton Turner and Keagan Lion-Cachet all in the top six.

Regular captain Rilee Rossouw was unavailable on Tuesday because his wife had given birth in the morning, but Verreynne confirmed after the match that the change of captain will be in place until the end of the tournament.

“We wanted to freshen up the team with new guys and they’ve had an immediate impact. We’ve had five guys sitting on the side who are very hungry and we did really nicely in the field, just keeping it simple,” Verreynne said.

“I thought with both the ball and in the field we were exceptional and we were really ruthless, which is maybe what we have lacked up till now. We just kept putting pressure on the Super Kings and the way we played is very pleasing and important because we’ve spoken about getting momentum to take into the back stretch of the competition.”

The Pretoria Capitals are now just one point behind the fourth-placed Super Kings, with both franchises having two games remaining. The Joburgers host Paarl Royals and Durban Super Giants, while the Capitals play home and away against MI Cape Town, so it is going to be a tense finale to the round-robin stages.

Joburg Super Kings coach Stephen Fleming was upset by his team’s failure to exhibit much tenacity. After their poor batting display, they were scattergun with the ball and sloppy in the field, two catches going down. The most crucial was Marques Ackerman being missed on 0 by Lutho Sipamla at deep backward point when Pretoria were two down inside the first five overs. The left-hander went on to score 39 off 22 balls, which settled the contest in poised fashion.

“It was a really bad one, a poor performance. There’s been a bit of a trend this season that batting first seems a bit more challenging, but the players didn’t have the mindset to work their way out of a tough situation. We were sloppy with the bat, the ball and in the field, so 0/3 of our skills worked, which is a problem,” Fleming said.

“The Capitals were able to extract variable pace and bounce, but we contributed to our own demise, we should have posted 140 but we just gave up too easily. You need to adapt to conditions and get a score on the board, but the modern player doesn’t seem to have that toughness to find a way to do it. It’s mostly mental.”

With the Western Cape teams playing such inspired cricket at the moment, Fleming admitted that it will now take a miracle for the Joburg Super Kings to finish in the top two and earn themselves two chances of making the final.

“We’re probably out of the race for one and two, but there are three teams hunting hard for the other two playoff places. We have our last two games at home, where we are very comfortable. So that’s a positive, but we have to play better,” Fleming said.

The Pretoria Capitals, meanwhile, seem to have found some belated inspiration. The rousing fast bowling of Peters had much to do with that. The 25-year-old was born and schooled in Pretoria and represented the SA U19s in 2018. He played 28 matches for Northerns across all three formats, but for some reason left to play for Border in 2021.

Thankfully for a bowler of his potential, he has been playing for North-West in Division One for the last two seasons.

While Peters may not be known to many, Verreynne had a brief but memorable meeting with him before they became SA20 team-mates.

“I played against him in a T20 match for Western Province last season. The first ball I didn’t see and the second ball got me out. So I knew what he was about and obviously I’ve seen him a lot in training now. He’s a serious talent with the ability to bowl 150km/h-plus, and his ability to bowl at any stage of the innings impresses me. Plus his attitude and hunger is most pleasing,” Verreynne said.

SUN CITY – Martin Rohwer is eager to start the new season well and get up the order of merit as soon as he can, and the four-time Sunshine Tour winner surged to the top of the leaderboard after the first round of the SunBet Challenge hosted by Sun City on Wednesday.

Rohwer, who began his round with an eagle on the par-five 10^th, fired a five-under-par 67 at the Gary Player Country Club on Wednesday to claim a one-stroke lead after the first day of the third event so far this season.

The Kloof Country Club member hit a 270m drive on the 505m 10^th and then hit a hybrid just short of the green, from where he sank his chip for the eagle-three. He birdied the next par-five, the 14^th, and then gathered three successive birdies on the 18^th, 1^st and 2^nd holes. His final birdie came on the par-four sixth, while he only dropped two shots, making fives on the par-four 13^th and eighth holes.

“Obviously it was a great start, chipping straight up the hill into the hole for an eagle on my first, and I played some solid golf after that too,” Rohwer said. “It was a very cold morning, but then it warmed up and there was really not much wind, it was a lovely benign day.

“I drove the ball really well today, which is obviously a big advantage at Gary Player Country Club because then your second shots are not too difficult. This course does suit my game, I won the Vodacom Origins of Golf Final here in 2022 and last year I had a chance to win this event before finishing third. It’s a fader’s course and I fade the ball off the tee.

“I’m just trying to get up The Courier Guy Order of Merit early doors this season and then I will work on my swing during the break later this month,” Rohwer said.

Rohwer was one stroke ahead of Lyle Rowe and Werner Deyzel, who shot four-under-par 68s.

In stark contrast to Rohwer, Deyzel started his round with a bogey on the par-four first hole and then a double-bogey at the par-five second. But instead of responding with bile, the 24-year-old Deyzel summoned brilliance and played his next 16 holes in a remarkable seven-under-par. He also eagled the 10^th and made five birdies.

Zimbabwe’s Stuart Krog, who first came to prominence in 2014 with his tenacious performances in the World Junior Golf Series, shining alongside the most promising Brazilian, South African, Irish, Scandinavian and American talent, was on three-under-par 69 alongside Estiaan Conradie and Sweden’s Fredrik From.

The constrained new reality that faces the Proteas Test team calls for a different approach and national red-ball coach Shukri Conrad says he also wants the squad to adopt a new way of thinking.

Because South Africa will be playing so little Test cricket for the foreseeable future – there will be just four Tests at home this summer – the Proteas need to make the most of every game and extract as much as possible from every outing.

But the ever-pugnacious Conrad also doesn’t want the team to start feeling sorry for their lot and sink into a victim mentality. The home Test programme opens on November 27 against Sri Lanka at Kingsmead in Durban, and they then take on the islanders at St George’s Park in Gqeberha from December 5.

That is the exact same schedule as in February 2019 when Sri Lanka claimed an historic 2-0 series win, their first in South Africa. Previous Proteas teams have made little effort to disguise their unhappiness with having to play on spin-friendly surfaces at home, especially at Kingsmead, but that has changed under Conrad’s watch and he states emphatically that he considers South Africa to be “heavy favourites” for that series.

Pakistan then visit for the Boxing Day and New Years Tests in Centurion and Cape Town respectively, which will suit their pace-heavy attack.

“I think it’s great to be playing in Durban. We had a camp there in the winter and it’s a fantastic facility, CEO Heinrich Strydom has done some unbelievable stuff. It’s lekker to play there and we should be heavy favourites, but without being complacent,” Conrad told kenborland.com in an exclusive interview.

“We should start wearing the favourites’ tag more at home and it’s going to be four massive home Tests this summer, not just in terms of the World Test Championship but also for the growth of the team.

“Given we don’t play enough Tests at home, speed-growth is required. Unfortunately we don’t have the luxury of playing 15 Tests a year, so we can’t give players good runs and bring them along slowly. The schedule demands making big calls on players and they have to produce the goods quickly, like Tristan Stubbs, who has shown enough already at number three.

“But this squad has dispelled any talk of not wanting to play at certain venues. It’s a bunch of young bucks and a couple of old hands and they just want to get on with it. They want to get back to being a leading Test side,” Conrad said.

The Test coach was speaking at Willowmoore Park in Benoni after his SA A team had just been soundly beaten by Sri Lanka A to lose their red-ball series 2-0, having earlier gone down 2-1 in the one-dayers. It was a terrible day for South African cricket in general, with the men’s side being bowled out for just 106 and being thrashed by Afghanistan in the first ODI in Sharjah, and the women’s team losing by 13 runs to Pakistan in their T20 series in Multan. Our ladies did at least bounce back and win their series by winning the third T20 on Friday.

Conrad was unequivocal in saying the national teams’ struggles are mostly due to not enough cricket being played at domestic level.

“We’ve actually gained very little from this A series, except the confirmation of the gap between international and our domestic cricket. These are the guys who have done very well at domestic level, so it’s not a great advert for that. They’ve been out-bowled, out-batted and out-thought by Sri Lanka.

“These SA A fixtures are a lot about who can take the step up and the message is quite simple really: what’s below the Test side is concerning. But it’s not entirely the players’ fault – to get better they have to play more, both in Tests and in more first-class cricket.

“If you’re only playing seven first-class games a season then you’re not going to get better. I don’t want it to be about me fighting the system, but we only play 42 days of domestic cricket this season! We can’t have that and whatever the format, we need to be playing more of it.

“CSA obviously have good reasons for the schedule and they also want to know what the best solution is for the domestic game, but at the end of the day we need to find a way to prioritise domestic cricket, even at the expense of the SA A team. If we don’t have quality players feeding into the SA A squad then that structure means nothing.

“I understand the constraints and CSA can only cut their cloth to what they have. But every coach wants more cricket and CSA have committed to it. And first-class cricket is the most important. A lot of cricketers start as hotshot T20 players, but they don’t realise their full potential until they have cut their teeth in first-class cricket.

“Red-ball cricket teaches you about option-taking, you get to understand your game and the different situations you get to face out in the middle. First-class cricket is the breeding ground for all formats and the shop window for talent. It’s how you become a better white-ball player. You still need the art of batsmanship and that has gone out of our game a bit, as seen by our batting on a ragging pitch in Sharjah,” Conrad said.

Two possible Tests in Bangladesh from October 15, depending on CSA getting clearance from their security team this weekend, will be a welcome addition to the schedule, but Conrad knows he has to fast-track everything if South Africa are to make any progress in the red-ball format.

The Bulls marched into the quarterfinals of the Champions Cup on Saturday with a thumping 59-19 win over Olympique Lyon at Loftus Versfeld, and it was the ‘New Bulls’ who did it, playing with wonderful attacking spark and really keeping the ball alive.

The traditional way of winning knockout games for the Bulls has been through subduing the opposition through power – using their physicality to dominate the gainline, scrum and maul to win penalties and then play off a traditionally brilliant lineout.

But on Saturday, kicking off at 1.30pm at altitude on a sunny day, they used the conditions to their advantage and unlocked the ball-playing, attacking skills that are also prevalent in their squad. Make no mistake, the physicality was still there, bossing the gainline and using aggressive defence to force turnovers, which they were impressive in turning into attacking opportunities.

The Bulls scored nine tries and the inventiveness and skill of the backline was marvellous to behold, even if at times some over-ambitious play led to the match being scrappy.

“We scored some outstanding tries and we’ve seen the Bulls go from a scrumming and mauling team to the type of rugby we played today,” coach Jake White said. “I’m very pleased that we are able to interchange the way we play, today we used playing on the Highveld and the playing surface to our advantage.

“We wanted to move them around and the French teams do tend to play scrappy rugby, but we also wanted to do it with control, use the altitude and their travel against them. There probably were times when we were a bit too loose.

“But we did what Leinster did to us last weekend and that’s go up a gear in the second half, we definitely replicated that. Sometimes we kicked the ball away too much in the first half, but in the second half you see the tries we scored because we kept the ball in hand. That try from our own line, where practically everyone touched the ball and we scored under the poles, was probably the try of the season and it showed we can play in different ways,” White said.

New talent was also to the fore with wing Sebastian de Klerk scoring twice, 21-year-old Reinhardt Ludwig having a strong game at blindside flank and 19-year-old JF van Heerden starting with aplomb at lock, Ruan Nortje being pulled 10 minutes before the start due to injury.

The 54^th-minute try the Bulls scored to stretch their lead to 38-14 was probably the finished article in terms of how White wanted his team to play in favourable conditions.

Eighthman Elrigh Louw ran from his own five-metre line, Kurt-Lee Arendse typically provided a proper counter-attacking spark, there was great support from replacement hooker Akker van der Merwe, props Mornay Smith and Gerhard Steenekamp were involved too, there was a strong run from Ludwig and then scrumhalf Embrose Papier rounded off.

Despite the emphatic win, White said the Bulls, as a team, are not the finished article just yet.

“Last season we were knocked over away from home by Toulouse in the last 16, and then a year later we are hosting that game, which is already an improvement, and we won so now we’ve reached another level: the top eight.

“I’m very happy and proud, but I’m also fully aware what sort of teams have won this competition. If we play the top team in England next – Northampton Saints – then it will be there at 8pm, it might be rainy and cold, very different to the sun shining at Loftus at 1.30pm.

“But it’s teams that can adapt that win this competition. We are not there yet and I’m not saying we have the recipe. It’s a learning and growing path and the quicker we complete it the better,” White said.

Scorers

Bulls – Tries: Sebastian de Klerk (2), Embrose Papier (2), Marcell Coetzee, Ruan Vermaak, Willie le Roux, David Kriel, Chris Smith. Conversions: Johan Goosen (5), Smith (2).

Olympique Lyon – Tries: Martin Page-Relo, penalty try, Thaakir Abrahams. Conversion: Paddy Jackson.