Ken Borland

The Proteas are off to the Caribbean on Monday and, having gathered on Friday, new captain Dean Elgar has spent the weekend almost trying to market his new leadership style to an expanded squad of 19 players.

Elgar is one of the characters of the changeroom, and is often considered a joker, but he has shown he has strong leadership credentials at the Titans and certainly commands the respect of the players. But a new era begins next week, post the captaincy tenures of Faf du Plessis and Quinton de Kock, and Elgar has been making sure everyone is on the same page as to the way things are going to be done now.

“We had a great chat on our first night together, when I mapped out how I see things going forward and we had a conversation around that. It was very constructive and those conversations will be ongoing over the next few weeks. I want to try and change the mindsets going forward, it’s a challenge with 18 different individuals who all have different opinions.

“So I’m trying to get buy-in, get the guys to trust the process. Hopefully some of what I’ve done in the past can rub off on the players, they need to know they can rely on me and follow me. We haven’t played much Test cricket lately, so it’s been difficult to get a process going that would make us competitive. I had a lot of quality conversations with Graeme Smith through the years and I would be letting the team down if I didn’t use that,” Elgar said at the weekend.

The 33-year-old Elgar said he would be leaning on other players who have been part of the Test squad for more than five years like Temba Bavuma, Quinton de Kock, Keshav Maharaj and Kagiso Rabada, because their experience will be vital for a rebuilding side.

“Those players are so valuable and there is a great demand for them around the world of cricket, you can’t replicate their knowledge. There’s not a lot of experience floating around at the moment, so their presence is massive for the environment. It was a totally different era when I started playing Test cricket under Graeme Smith, we had a lot more caps around then.

“But I would like to try and use my learnings from back then, use the knowledge I gained. That time moulded me and taught me a lot of good lessons, so I would like to bring that into this side. We need to get back to scoring big hundreds, bowlers taking five-fors and taking 20 wickets to win a Test. There used to be that rich culture of success and with extended squads now we have all the options we need,” Elgar said.

South Africa’s director of rugby Rassie Erasmus on Friday confirmed that next Saturday, June 5, will be the day when the 45 lucky South African rugby players who get to play the British and Irish Lions will be announced.

That enlarged squad will go into a hard bubble together and will see their first action nearly a month later in the first Test against Georgia. The initial group will also comprise the 23 players that will represent SA A against the tourists in Cape Town on July 14. The squad will then be cut to 35-37 players ahead of the first Test against the Lions on July 24.

Both Erasmus and Springbok coach Jacques Nienaber said they were heartened by having plenty of talent to choose from.

“In a way we are lucky to have players all over the world because our players in South Africa have just been playing against each other. But a guy like Jasper Wiese has done really well for Leicester, Rynhardt Elstadt and Cheslin Kolbe won the European Cup with Toulouse and Damian de Allende has been doing really well at Munster. We also have wonderful young talent locally, so we look pretty okay,” Erasmus said.

“Three players from the World Cup squad have retired and Lood de Jager, RG Snyman and Warrick Gelant are touch-and-go with injuries, but the rest are all in the running. The Tests against Georgia fall within the international window and we’ll have other goals against them but we still need to perform and win,” Nienaber added.

“There’s been a joint effort from the referees, coaches and players to get as much ball-in-play time as possible in our local rugby and there has been a massive improvement from the Currie Cup. We were a bit worried but comparing the figures to the Premiership and the Pro14, there’s good parity now and we are really happy.”

Advertisers may love to say “But wait, there’s more”, but for Western Province rugby it is a case of it being far less.

At least when it comes to the money they are spending on players, and in particular on young Springbok fullback Damian Willemse.

Recent reports have alleged Willemse is earning R5.6 million a year to play for the Stormers, linking the extraordinary salary to allegations of reckless spending at the troubled union.

But Stormers coach John Dobson on Tuesday lashed out at the unethical reporting of individual player’s salaries and stated that the figures were wrong in any case.

“We have done very well to retain most of the squad we have until 2024 and we are still 15.3% below the salary cap. So we are certainly not throwing money at players as alluded to, and that’s with several Springboks staying, even though some of them were offered more elsewhere. Some players were even approached outside the transfer window.

“A line was absolutely crossed when Damian Willemse had an incorrect salary published, the figure was considerably off, it is much less than reported. To speculate about someone’s salary and then not get it right affects both the player and the cohesion of the squad. He’s a 23-year-old who is playing superbly and is desperate for Western Province to be successful,” Dobson said.

Dobson also confirmed that negotiations with 2019 World Player of the Year Pieter-Steph du Toit are ongoing, saying that the talismanic Springbok has a strong affinity with the Western Cape.

“We’ve been talking to Pieter-Steph the whole year and he wanted to get back on to the field first before making any decisions. He has not signed anywhere overseas yet and we have planned for both scenarios – him staying with us or leaving – in our budget. But when a global star comes on the market, no South African franchise would be able to stand against the offer.

“But Pieter-Steph has got family and business interests in the Western Cape, he’s a big part of the team and the region, and he and his agents have been very transparent. Trying to match an overseas offer – if it’s a million euro or more particularly millions of yen – would break our salary cap, that would be about one-third of the salary cap on one player. But maybe he’ll go away for a short time and then come back,” Dobson explained.

When Sharks coach Sean Everitt loans out most of his starting line-up to the Springboks this week, it will give him the chance to work with the players who are likely to play for the bulk of the rest of the year and fix the problems that were evident in their weekend loss to the Stormers.

This is a bye week for the South African teams in the Rainbow Cup and the Springboks will be holding an alignment camp. Then the stars will return for the last two weeks of the competition and what has now become a three-horse race for a place in the June 19 final against the European winners, following the Sharks’ weekend loss to the Stormers and the Lions upstaging the log-leading Bulls.

“Playing local derbies four weeks in a row has been really tough and it takes a toll physically. The guys deserve some rest and we’ll now have a week to work hard on the larger squad, get them ready for the Currie Cup. It’s a good opportunity for me to work closely with them, make sure they are ready to rock ‘n roll.

“Losing two in a row won’t give me sleepless nights, but I’ll be pondering how to fix the problems. And I’m not worried because the problems are fixable; if there was a lack of effort, enthusiasm or energy then we would be in trouble, but you can’t question the effort of the team, they worked hard and gave everything against a very powerful Stormers pack,” Everitt said after their 22-25 defeat at Kings Park.

The Sharks intimated that they would rather have taken on the Stormers with the sun out, instead of the overcast, wet weather which forced them into an arm-wrestle against one of the better packs in the competition.

“The Stormers always try to slow us down, we scored tries from quick lineouts and quick taps in Cape Town, that’s a part of our game and we got reward for that in our last match against them. We want to play a fast tempo of rugby but it was difficult in these conditions, especially late in the second half, when it rained quite hard. We had dominance for the first 30 minutes and for patches in the second half.

“But the lineout is a massive source of possession and a big contributor to the number of tries you score. We did really well in the first half, but we were under the pump in the second half, the Stormers have three really good jumpers, some really tall timber. So there’s a lot of hard work ahead on that, that’s the main area that let us down, while we also had lapses in defence,” Everitt said.