Ken Borland

The day after Christmas can be a bit of a downer considering the joy of the previous day, but there were many at SuperSport Park on Thursday who were adamant that they were not going to let anything get them down on the opening day of the first Test between South Africa and Pakistan.

For the festive crowd of more than 16 000 – the sold out signs went up in the afternoon – it helped ameliorate any hangovers, both literal and figurative, that they bought more than a million rand of beer on Thursday. According to Northerns Cricket Union CEO Jacques Faul, this is the first time that has ever happened at Centurion.

But for the Proteas players it took good old-fashioned determination and pride to ensure they kept coming back.

For the spearhead of the attack, Kagiso Rabada, there was the frustration of any number of plays-and-misses by the Pakistan batsmen as he whizzed delivery after delivery past the edges of the bat. But he did not let it get him down, never once dropping his head. His tenacity was not rewarded, but Mother Cricket will surely smile on the great paceman in the second innings.

Having won the toss and sent Pakistan in to bat, the Proteas had to endure a wicket-less first hour. Captain Temba Bavuma said in the huddle at the drinks break that the wickets will come, they must just stay patient.

Debutant Corbin Bosch, who has had to overcome more challenges than most in getting to the international stage, then struck with his first delivery in Test cricket, the first ball after drinks. Pakistan captain Shan Masood (17), having put on 36 with fellow opener Saim Ayub, drove at a full delivery angled across him and edged to gully.

While Bosch finished a memorable first day in Proteas whites, taking four for 63 in 15 overs, it was Dane Paterson who did most of the damage as Pakistan were bowled out for 211 three balls after tea.

Paterson followed up Bosch’s memorable moment – he is just the 25th bowler to take a wicket with his first ball in Test cricket and the fifth South African – by then snaring wickets in successive overs.

Saim (14) was caught behind after edging an excellent delivery that was typical of Paterson’s effort on Boxing Day: In a great channel just outside off stump and the perfect, slightly fuller length.

Pakistan’s kingpin, Babar Azam, was caught in the slips for just 4 edging a limp, indecisive fiddle outside off-stump, and Bosch then claimed a second wicket as Saud Shakeel (14) gloved an attempted hook to wicketkeeper Kyle Verreynne.

Kamran Ghulam and Mohammad Rizwan took Pakistan to 88 for four at lunch, and went on to add 81 for the fifth wicket. But it was Paterson who returned to break the partnership, frustrating Ghulam (54) with his accuracy and drawing a reckless charge down the pitch and wild swipe that was caught at fine leg.

Rizwan (27) had also charged and flailed unsuccessfully at Paterson a couple of times, and a hard-handed drive saw him caught in the slips in the Western Province paceman’s next over.

Salman Agha (18) was also caught trying to slog Paterson, who removed five of the top seven batsmen for career-best figures of 16-4-61-5, his second successive five-wicket haul.

The 35-year-old Paterson has had several critics moaning about his selection for the Test side, but he has not let it get him down.

“I’m drifting nicely into the sunset and I’m happy just to be putting the team in good positions. I will be 36 next year, but I don’t really want to mention my age,” Paterson laughed in the press conference after the close of play.

“If people have something to say about me then they should take it in return too, that’s freedom of speech. The critics provide me with fuel to prove people wrong. But my focus is on putting the team in good positions, it’s not about me.

“I’m probably not a fan favourite because I’m 35 and I bowl at 124km/h. But hopefully after these last two Tests I will get some likes!” Paterson said.

The skilful seamer gave his fellow pacemen Bosch and Rabada likes as well.

“Corbin was in his home conditions and obviously has knowledge of what works here, but to have a debut like that and push for five wickets is a dream come true, it was really quite special.

“KG is special; even against Sri Lanka he had a lot of plays-and-misses. But he keeps on coming, which is good to see, and he doesn’t let it get him down, although that sort of bad luck can be frustrating. But he is a quality bowler,” Paterson said.

Proteas Test coach Shukri Conrad often selects on gut feel and Paterson’s inclusion has been controversial but undoubtedly a success. In his five Tests under Conrad this year, he has taken 20 wickets at a brilliant average of just 21.75.

“I’ve known Shukri for a long time, I played a lot of amateur cricket when he was coaching at Western Province. We had a chat in January and I knew that I would be going to New Zealand. I thought that would probably be two Tests and I was done, but we had a chat and he said he had a plan for me. I knew what I had to do after that, I had to get in better shape and put in the performances at domestic level.

“Hopefully Shukri is now chuffed with his selection,” Paterson said.

In reply, a very good 47 not out by Aiden Markram, stroking nine handsome boundaries off 67 deliveries, took South Africa to 82 for three at stumps.

The pitch may have been unusually slow by SuperSport Park standards, but there was movement off the deck right until the close of play. Tony de Zorzi (2), Ryan Rickelton (8) and Tristan Stubbs (9) all fell to fine deliveries from Khurram Shehzad (twice) and Mohammad Abbas, trapping Stubbs lbw, that seamed a long way.

The cricket season just past has seen Wiaan Mulder freed from his cell of self-imposed pressure and doubt, and the Central Gauteng Lions all-rounder’s reward has been a return to the Proteas T20 squad, albeit for the warm-up series against the West Indies in Jamaica at the end of this month and not the World Cup.

The Lions were the outstanding domestic team of the summer, winning both the four-day competition and the CSA T20 Challenge that ended last weekend in a final at the Wanderers, with the Gautengers easing past the KZN Dolphins by seven wickets with 14 balls to spare.

Mulder was at the forefront of that successful chase, blazing his way to a ferocious 55 not out off just 26 balls, with four sixes. It capped a superb tournament for the 26-year-old, who scored 248 runs at an average of 35.42 and a strike-rate of 139.32. Mulder also took 11 wickets and conceded just 7.10 runs-per-over, making him the only player to appear in the top-20 of both the batting and bowling averages.

It followed his destructive performances in the SA20 league, where he scored 297 runs at an average of 37.13 and a strike-rate of 157.14 for Durban Super Giants.

In the Lions’ triumphant four-day campaign, Mulder was their leading run-scorer with 549 at 54.90, which included a couple of centuries. He also claimed 16 wickets at an average of 26.50.

Little wonder then that the Proteas have come calling again. He played in the ODI series against India last December, but Mulder is set to play his first T20 international since September 2021 in Sri Lanka.

But in a candid interview before his selection was announced this week, Mulder admitted that he had not made the most of his previous Proteas call-ups.

“The biggest thing for me at international level is mental. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself, which is made worse when you think every game could be my last,” Mulder said after the Lions’ T20 triumph.

“I do my best when I am just given the freedom to go out and play; unfortunately I’m an over-thinker and then I try too hard and get a bit down on myself. I’ve done relatively well with the ball for the Proteas, but I haven’t really shown what I can do with the bat. But maybe my time will come in the next couple of years,” Mulder said.

The all-rounder’s mantle is a tough one to bear in South African cricket because we have been blessed with arguably the greatest of them all – Jacques Kallis – as well as a succession of legends who could both win matches with the bat and double as a proper fast bowler: Mike Procter, Clive Rice, Kallis, Lance Klusener and Shaun Pollock have spoilt us.

Mulder does not bowl express pace, but he is a very handy practitioner who can fulfil a variety of roles. The St Stithians product says the presence of another great – Allan Donald – on the Lions coaching staff has helped him enormously in terms of growing his skills and even becoming a little quicker.

“Allan Donald has been massive for us and for me personally. I’ve been working with him to get more energy behind the ball, being able to bowl back-of-the-hand deliveries. It’s difficult bowling in the powerplay at the Wanderers, the ball really flies here, so I’ve had to up-skill a lot.

“I feel like I’m bowling well and it’s nice to be consistently bowling. Not bowling five matches in a row in the SA20 gets a little frustrating,” Mulder said.

The up-skilling Mulder has done on his batting will also hopefully pay off at international level.

“Russell Domingo [head coach] said there were certain things that have to get better in our game and there was an expectation to up-skill. There was a lot of hard work in the transition period after he became coach.

“And you could see when Reeza Hendricks and I were batting together in the final, we made sure the required rate never ran away from us even though we weren’t hitting boundaries. We were getting the ones and twos and making sure there were no dot-balls,” Mulder said.

When Lions coach Ivan van Rooyen said after the game that Munster had been “able to prevent us from playing”, it was said with grudging respect more than churlishness, and few could argue that the defending champions were not deserving winners at Ellis Park even if the 33-13 scoreline maybe did not fully indicate how competitive the home side were.

The brilliance of the Munster performance was that the more the Lions roared, huffed and puffed, the more resolute and clinical Graham Rowntree’s side became. The coach said afterwards that the sheer power his players had shown had been why the Lions were stifled, the key to victory in a match in which Munster only had 36% of possession and 31% of territory.

“I was very pleased with our power game, especially the way we stopped their maul and used ours. It was a very good defensive display and we managed to get our power game going, which is something we have drilled a lot,” Rowntree said.

“It’s been very special that we’ve shown power on both sides of the ball against two big South African teams now and I’m delighted that we’ve come away from this trip with 10 points.

“We had a plan and we stuck to it, except for a few moments where we strayed off and were a bit loose and our discipline let us down. But we have some tremendous leaders, guys who are real warriors in the big moments, and we are always moving on from our mistakes.

“There are still elements of our game we need to think about, to not score more tries is maybe a bit frustrating, but the fundamentals are always there. Last year told us that we have composure when we are in the fire,” Rowntree said.

Given their ability to win away from home and the fact that they seem to play better the stronger the pressure, Munster certainly look capable of defending their United Rugby Championship title. But Rowntree is blacklisting any talk that is focused too far ahead.

“We have momentum but we still have to take it game-by-game. Winning both games on the highveld gives us a lot of confidence and we do have some guys coming back from injury. It’s pretty much knockout rugby from now till the end of the competition,” Rowntree said.

Van Rooyen praised Munster for their management of the game.

“You could feel them dictating the tempo of the match, and then they got ahead and managed to squeeze us. Once we got going, we looked dangerous, but that’s all part of the squeeze, they didn’t allow us to counter.

“We’ve got to try and generate pace in our play, but they kept kicking the ball out, they made us battle at the breakdown and they spoilt our momentum in the lineouts as well. Munster didn’t do anything we didn’t expect, but they just executed so well and they make everything slow. We have been outsmarted,” Van Rooyen said.

Recent instalments of the Khaya Majola Week for the country’s best U19 boys cricketers have not seen an official winner declared, but even if that policy had continued this season, there would have been no doubt the Central Gauteng Lions were the undisputed champions of the event in Makhanda at the end of last year.

Our young Lions Pride were the only side that went through the week unbeaten and had three players named in the prestigious SA Schools team, as well as another two in the SA Colts side.

 The Central Gauteng Lions U16 girls also went unbeaten through their national Week in Pietermaritzburg and played some brilliant cricket. 

According to boys U19 coach Ahmed Nawab, excellent preparation was top of the list of reasons for his team finishing first.

“The most important thing was preparation and it was very specific in order to ensure the team played as a unit. It was my third year with the team and it took a couple of years of hard work to get that elusive first title,” Nawab says.

“The boys played really well and they trusted our preparation and plans. We started with a winter group of players, to work on player development, and the U16 national weeks in the last couple of years also helped us to identify potential talent.

“We would have specific days of training where we were building towards the Khaya Majola Week, we prepped through the winter and we also had a trials week. All of that was also very important for me to understand the players better, to build trust and relationships. It has been a very important exercise to show our depth as a union,” Nawab says.

While providing six members of the SA U19 World Cup squad is a source of tremendous pride for the Central Gauteng Lions union, it did make life terribly difficult at times for the coaching staff because it meant our young Pride had to rely on other players to triumph at the Khaya Majola Week.

“A lot of the time our six SA U19 players were not available because they had to go away to national camps. We had them all together for a week-and-a-bit before going to Makhanda and once we were there, they each had to sit out at least one game in the Week,” Nawab explains.

“So the rest of the squad had to understand that they themselves were actually the core of the team and it was up to them to put us in the good position. The key performances during the Khaya Majola Week actually came from those outside the national squad.

“Our two main values as a team were to be resilient because conditions meant you had to grind, and to make sure that all our sticks were in the fire, burning bright,” Nawab says.

While the new-ball bowling of Kwena Maphaka and Esosa Aihevba befitted their status as SA U19 stars, Fayaaz Vawda was also phenomenal up front; Luke Francis played a couple of key innings that dug the side out of tough situations; and Tjaart Mentz was an absolute find for the Lions, coming from one of the smaller cricketing schools in Helpmekaar. He showed he can hit a long ball as well as playing unorthodox strokes, while his wicket-to-wicket bowling was also very useful.

 But the talent in the Central Gauteng Lions U16 girls team is just as exciting. Neo Molefe, who scored back-to-back centuries without losing her wicket in the opening two games, was named both batter and player of the tournament. Fay Cowling was honoured as all-rounder and fielder of the week.

“There’s definitely a lot of talent in Lions cricket and our winning week was testimony to that,” triumphant coach Teboho Ntsukunyane says. “We did lots of hard work in preparation, we began our work earlier in the year so that we could expose the girls to lots of middle time.

“By August I had pretty much identified our squad and we were able to work in groups. I already knew the balance I wanted and the girls really complemented each other. In October we played games against senior Division II teams just to try and expose our players more and see how they expressed themselves under pressure.

“We also had some specific preparation like getting them to bowl at our senior DP World Lions star Sunette Viljoen-Louw, who hits the ball so hard, so they could get used to that. Their mental strength got better and better and all that exposure meant they were able to handle the pressures of the Week in Pietermaritzburg.

“That also enabled us to get our conditioning on-point and hone our game-plan, our role-clarity was very good and we understood what brand of cricket we wanted to play. Then it was just a case of making it easy for the girls to express themselves,” Ntsukunyane says.

The success of the Lions U19 and U16 teams is a clear warning to their rivals that they intend to dominate domestic cricket for a while yet.

“It really is a proud moment for us as Lions cricket to have witnessed the performances of our teams in both our regional and national Weeks hosted in all parts of South Africa. The achievements are testament to the hard work done over a long period of time in preparation of the players. We knew that 2023 was going to be rough with all the changes implemented to the format of the Weeks and the trophies at stake. These changes include the promotion and relegation at both U16 and U18 for boys’ and girls’ sections,” Reuben Mandlazi, the CGL Cricket Services Manager, says.

“One could not be prouder with the achievements of both U16 girls and U18 boys as they were crowned champions and the U16 boys and U18 girls finished third. We could not have achieved such good results without the support and hard work of our schools, as they continue to play a pivotal role through the strong cricket system.

“In addition, we thank everyone who played a role, including parents and selectors who identified these players under pressure. We recognise that selection is not an easy task and we are proud of them. We are also proud of the boys who represented South Africa at the ICC U19 World Cup hosted in South Africa.

“We know that year two of the new era will not be any easier, therefore we need to keep working harder and not be complacent about anything. Well done to all the teams and they continue to be the pride of Jozi,” Mandlazi said.

Central Gauteng Lions umpires also shone during the busy December period with very pleasing results.

Amy Gear stood in the final of the Girls U19 Week, as did Angus Gouws in the final of the Boys U16 week. Gear then went on to officiate as third umpire in the CSA 4-Day Series match between the DP World Lions and the Tuskers at the Wanderers, a remarkable achievement for a 17-year-old.

Davies Radebe stood in the thi^rd/four^th place final of the USSA A Week, while Zuber Saleh officiated in the SA Schools vs SA Colts match, the thi^rd/four^th place final of USSA A Week and was selected for Cubs week in January.

Mbekezeli ‘Randy’ Nkomo,  Mpumelelo Ngwevela, Nelisiwe Madondo and Roodt Jacobs were also appointed for national Weeks and acquitted themselves well, according to umpires administrator Brian Catt.

There was also good news on the scoring front with Central Gauteng Lions scorers co-ordinator  Kishen Pillay happy with the ratings achieved by the members of the association during an extremely busy festive period.

Natasha Nyoni, who scored at the Khaya Majola Week and was rated at 96%, and Mary Ramphela, who officiated at the U19 Girls Week and notched 99%, both finished in the top 2 of their respective Weeks.

Kagiso Taukobong finished fourth at the U16 Girls Week with 91% and Lebohang Dinake was in the top 10 at the U16 Boys Week with 87%.

“As a scorers association, we are pleased with the feedback and ratings received from the National Weeks, however we will strive to get even better,” Pillay says.