Ken Borland

Amateur golfers were set free from the chains of the Covid-19 Lockdown seven weeks ago and now the professionals look set to return to work in three weeks’ time, in a bio-bubble.

The Sunshine Tour is set to resume on August 19 and tournaments will initially be restricted to just the Johannesburg area.

Hopefully that will set off a chain reaction and the Nedbank Golf Challenge, with some talk of it being cancelled, takes place in all its glory as scheduled in early December to crown a tumultuous year, followed by the South African Open in January.

“We’re hoping to get the professionals started again around August 19, we’ll make a final decision next week once all the medical regulations have been gazetted,” Selwyn Nathan, the commissioner of the Sunshine Tour, told Saturday Citizen on Friday. “The IGT Tour and the Big Easy Tour are also hoping to get underway by the end of the month. At the moment the Sunshine Tour can only be played in Johannesburg.”

Killarney Country Club will be the first to make the daring plunge into professional golf in the time of Covid-19 and the Sunshine Tour are hoping to stage five events over seven weeks. There will be a two-week break after the first three tournaments to allow for anyone who falls sick to quarantine and at least be able to play in the last two events.

The tournaments will be held Wednesday to Friday to allow the golf clubs to be open for the amateurs over the weekend, allowing them to make valuable revenue.

Golfers from all over the country will be allowed to take part, but they will have to be responsible for logging their own health checks for 14 days before a tournament and will also be responsible for their caddies and all risk mitigation arrangements for them.s Three sponsors have apparently already lined up for the first batch of tournaments and the mini-tour will be streamed live across both Sunshine Tour and DStv platforms.

The Black Lives Matter logo might not be printed on their playing shirts when cricket returns on Saturday with the Solidarity Cup three-team event in Centurion, but leading White Proteas have now joined the movement and publicly expressed their support for the anti-racism drive.

Cricket South Africa director of cricket Graeme Smith has indicated that the playing shirts had already been printed, for an event that was originally meant to take place on June 27, when the cricketing world began to embrace the Black Lives Matter movement.

Nevertheless, when former Proteas captain Faf du Plessis “takes the knee” on Saturday along with other White players like Rassie van der Dussen, Dwaine Pretorius and Anrich Nortje, it will be a powerful moment of solidarity with Lungi Ngidi and the other Black players who have spoken out in support of BLM.

Du Plessis has even taken matters further by apologising for his comment that the team “don’t see colour” when Temba Bavuma was left out of the Newlands Test against England at the start of the year.

“I surrender my opinions and take the knee as an intercessor. I acknowledge that South Africa is still hugely divided by racism and it is my personal responsibility to do my best to empathise, hear the stories, learn and then be part of the solution with my thoughts, words and actions. I have gotten it wrong before. Good intentions were failed by a lack of perspective when I said on a platform that I don’t see colour. In my ignorance I silenced the struggles of others by placing my own view on it.

“A race problem is a human race problem, if one part of the body hurts, we all stop, we empathise, we get perspective, we learn and then we tend to the hurting part of the body. So I am saying that all lives don’t matter UNTIL Black lives matter. I’m speaking up now, because if I wait to be perfect, I never will. I want to leave a legacy of empathy,” Du Plessis said in an Instagram post on Friday.

Van der Dussen and Pretorius, who both play for the Central Gauteng Lions and have had to wait a long time to kickstart their international careers, said they too support BLM.

“I will be proudly supporting the BLM movement and I will be taking a knee on Saturday. I honestly and wholeheartedly believe it’s the right thing to do. I also believe taking the knee is only the start. To me the BLM movement stands for the most basic right all people across the world deserve and that is the right to not be judged or segmented because of his/her colour, but rather for WHO they are.

“It’s not a movement that says Black lives are MORE important than any other colour. It’s my brother from another mother asking me please see me for WHO I am. Don’t persecute me because of my skin colour. Give me the same benefit of the doubt you would give someone with the same colour as you. Yes, the movement says ‘Black’, but I believe it’s relevant to any colour and race,” Pretorius said on Facebook.

Van der Dussen was asked on Twitter by journalist Max du Preez where he and several other Proteas stood on BLM, and the 31-year-old batsman tweeted in Afrikaans: “I support BLM, I’m against murder, I’m against all murders: physical, character and cultural murders. I support equal opportunities for all. Just because I support BLM does not mean I support violence or Marxism, so I refuse to be labelled by people.”

Like any good farmer who has planted his vegetables, cared for them carefully and patiently and then waits for a rich harvest, Hilton Moreeng believes the Proteas Women’s side is now ready to blossom as he begins another three-year stint in charge of the team.

Moreeng’s reappointment was confirmed on Wednesday, allowing the 42-year-old to continue the fine work he has done since 2012 in building a squad of talented youngsters into one of the best international teams. Under the former Free State wicketkeeper/batsman’s guidance, the Proteas have reached the semi-finals of the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup in 2014 and 2020 and the ICC Women’s World Cup in 2017. And in those last two final-four appearances they have come perilously close to beating both England and Australia, the powerhouses of the women’s game.

“It’s a great privilege for me to be reappointed, it shows the confidence Cricket South Africa has in the work I’ve done. This team is coming of age and it’s time we started challenging for ICC silverware. I hope to improve the team further and as a coach I am learning every day and no two days are alike. We want to be a top-three team and we are making strides towards that.

“But we cannot be complacent because the international cricket environment changes every day and we have to keep working extremely hard. But the building blocks we have are very good and in terms of skills we are now one of the best teams. We’ve had to be very patient, we want to be number one in the world one day, that’s everyone’s ambition but it doesn’t happen overnight,” Moreeng said on Wednesday.

The Proteas Women’s first assignment once they return to action will hopefully be a triangular series in England with India in September, but the 50-over World Cup in New Zealand starting next February is their priority in the short-term.

“We knew our tour of New Zealand earlier this year would be crucial in our preparation and whitewashing them on home soil shows our skills and character. Now we are seven months from the World Cup and we will focus on that. But it will be a very important series in England because it might be our only chance for competitive cricket before the World Cup. We will be working hard on what we can improve as a team and CSA are making sure we have everything we need,” Moreeng said.

Part of that is investigating the feasibility of a professional domestic women’s league. But in the meantime CSA are focusing on beefing up the women’s high performance and academy programmes.

“We believe the Momentum Proteas can now challenge the top three regularly and the results in New Zealand and Australia earlier this year show the top leadership of Hilton and Dane van Niekerk [captain]. It’s very important to CSA that this team now moves forward over the next three years and I’m very confident we’ve made the right decision in reappointing Hilton.

“We need to grow and enhance the environment. Hilton has put in a lot of hard work to grow the team to where they are, and now he has the opportunity to take them even further. He can grow them to another level and having a proper women’s league is an area of focus for us. A lot more investment has been put into the women’s pipeline and we are looking to strengthen that,” director of cricket Graeme Smith said.

The fact that his previous two-year ban for doping has now been quadrupled to eight years for his next offence is something Chiliboy Ralepelle’s lawyers believe is grounds for an appeal, but the former Springbok hooker’s career is almost certainly over after the South African Institute for Drugs-Free Sport’s independent doping tribunal announced another guilty verdict on Wednesday.

The 33-year-old tested positive for the growth hormone Zeranol while with the Sharks in January 2019. It was his second doping offence after being banned for two years in September 2015 for use of an anabolic steroid, Drostanolone, while recovering from injury in France.

Ralepelle has actually tested positive on three occasions, with his initial brush with the law coming in 2010 when he and wing Bjorn Basson were found to have the banned stimulant methylhexaneamine in their systems after the Springboks had played Ireland in Dublin on an end-of-year tour. But they were only given a reprimand when a judicial hearing found that it was not their fault because it came from a tainted supplement provided by the South African Rugby Union.

So it seems Ralepelle’s legal team are set to argue that it is only his second doping offence.

“We have concluded that there are definitely grounds for appeal, but we are creatures of instruction and we will take those instructions from Ralepelle on how he wants to proceed. We are preparing an opinion for Ralepelle on whether, solely from a legal perspective, he should appeal.

“There is one example: Chiliboy was previously banned for two years and the WADA laws say that the second offence must be double the standard for the first offence. In that respect, from our legal view, from a two-year previous ban, it should have been a four-year ban at best and not an eight-year ban. But we are still considering the contents of the judgement,” legal representative Hendrik Hugo told ENCA on Wednesday.

A four-year ban for a second offence involving serious drugs would appear to be a light punishment, however, given that some first-time offenders, such as Welshman Owen Morgan in 2017, have been given four-year sentences.

Springbok wing Aphiwe Dyantyi is facing a four-year ban himself after testing positive for three different steroids last year. According to SAIDS, a virtual hearing to the 25-year-old’s case should be held in the next two months.

At the other end of the spectrum, former Swansea hooker Dean Colclough was banned for eight years in 2014 for possessing and distributing steroids.