Ken Borland

If the Proteas are to be regularly playing on pitches with pace and bounce at home in the future then “the time is right to start moving now” towards the solution to the pitch problems that have been highlighted in South African cricket during the India tour, according to Cricket South Africa pitch consultant Hilbert Smit.

For a country renowned for the quality of their fast bowling, the pitches in South Africa have generally been becoming slower and lower, and the solution will be drop-in pitches, according to Smit.

“Our pitches are old, it’s as simple as that. Maybe only Centurion is less than 10 years old, so they are all over-used and full of organic matter. You must remember that a pitch is a living creature and when the grass dies off, you get natural decomposition which helps new grass to grow because nutrients are released. But you also get a build-up of organic matter and that’s what makes a pitch slow and low.

“And a new pitch can’t be used for international cricket for the first two years because it needs to settle and it’s more difficult to do this on-site because you have games next door or over it going on all the time. Plus we can only use the three or four middle strips for all televised games.

“Australia have similar conditions to us and they have addressed this problem with drop-in pitches. We have to make a plan too because with cricket starting on the highveld in August, there’s no time to grow pitches out in the middle. So drop-ins are the only solution,” Smit told Saturday Citizen on Friday.

The highly-experienced groundsman says he will be sending a comprehensive report to CSA at the end of March on the state of pitches around the country and, while Australia’s system is very expensive due to the cost of transporting the drop-ins, Smit believes necessity is the mother of invention and a local solution has been found which will bring the costs down to acceptable levels.

“In Australia it costs about A$7 million, but we do have a local engineer who has come up with a concept, a unique design, that could cut that to a one-off R2-3 million per ground. Then we can replace pitches every year. That is the way forward because it’s something we have to address,” Smit said.

While there will always be a debate around whether it is acceptable for the national team to demand certain types of pitches, there is general concensus around the cricketing world that wickets with pace and bounce are the best way to develop batsmen with the all-round game to succeed all over the world. Even India have pushed for those attributes at home.

Many have linked the fall of West Indies cricket to the decline in their pitches in the 1990s, hard surfaces with pace and carry becoming slow and low.

“You can’t expect to produce proper cricketers if you can’t produce proper conditions,” the late, great fast bowler Malcolm Marshall said in 1998 when he was the West Indies coach. “We’ve got batsmen coming through now with plenty of faults and that’s largely due to the sub-standard pitches they’re playing on.”

The good news for South African cricket is that there is agreement that there is a problem.

“Conditions in South Africa have changed quite a lot, the pitches are over-used and have become slower, more spin-friendly. There was a lot more pace and bounce when I started my career, for example in Durban, Shaun Pollock used to call the Kingsmead pitch his lawn because of all the grass. You now consider reverse-swing and spin as your main weapons there,” Graeme Smith, who debuted for the Proteas in 2002, said.

The groundsman’s lot is not an easy one with hostile African weather always threatening to derail the preparations, so they need all the help they can get given the enormous workload of their creations.

“Grass is what gives a pitch its pace, and our groundsmen are now trying to grow it through winter, but too much grass is dangerous. Cricket is the only sport in the world where you see the effect of such a little playing area, the pitch determines the whole way the game is played, everything’s all about that little 3×22 metre patch. It can cause a total mismatch.

“We are all human and we all get it wrong sometimes, plus you’ve got the influence of the weather as well. For an inexperienced groundsman, it is basically unfair and this series has highlighted that. But we don’t want to make the same mistakes, so we will have closer mentoring and link with the RPCs and Hubs to bring guys through. One of our shortcomings is mentoring and training,” Smit, who is only in his first year in a full-time capacity with CSA, said.

https://citizen.co.za/sport/south-africa-sport/sa-cricket-sport/1804869/the-time-is-now-for-south-african-cricket-to-cure-pitch-ills/

The Dolphins sacked Lance Klusener as their coach because they see themselves as a franchise that should be regularly winning trophies and not merely being in contention, CEO Pete de Wet told The Citizen on Monday.

Klusener was removed with immediate effect after four years at the helm, with Yashin Ebrahim and Roger Telemachus taking over as caretaker coaches. Because Klusener’s contract was not going to be renewed at the end of April, it was agreed that it made sense for him to go now so both parties could plan better for the future.

Under Klusener, the Dolphins’ only trophy was the 2013/14 RamSlam T20 Challenge. They reached the final of the same competition this season, but finished fifth in the Momentum One-Day Cup and are currently fourth in the Sunfoil Series, more than 20 points behind the third-placed Knights.

“Lance worked really hard to set up a solid foundation for the team, but the decision is not just driven by the results this season, but the board looked at the last three years. The expectation is that we should challenge for trophies year-in and year-out, the same as any other franchise. The reason we’re in business is to win trophies,” De Wet said.

Klusener said trophies should be seen as only part of the story, given the development of the players under his guard.

“I was a bit surprised by the decision if you consider where we’ve come from in the last four years, I don’t feel my journey has finished. There was no real reason for it, I wasn’t given any inkling before that the results were a problem. Before I took over, the Dolphins hadn’t won a trophy for 10 years.

“We won a trophy, made a couple of finals and semi-finals, but it’s about more than just trophies, quite a few players were produced for the national teams. I like to think that things like politics are part of the past, I just coached and kept my head down.

“But I would do it again, I was part of something special with the Dolphins. Hopefully I can now be part of bigger and better things,” Klusener told The Citizen.

Sharks CEO John Smit is hoping to regularly hear the applause of 30 000 people at Kings Park this year as his team mount a strong SuperRugby challenge, but he’s hoping too that other South African franchises are also pushing hard for the title because that will be the greatest benefit to the Springboks’ World Cup campaign.

Smit told The Citizen that there are enormous benefits to be gained from SuperRugby for the Springboks, remembering how crucial the tournament was in 2007 when he led South Africa to the World Cup crown in Paris. Earlier that year, the Bulls and Sharks had competed in the SuperRugby final, with the Bulls snatching a dramatic Bryan Habana-inspired one-point victory.

“The big thing in 2007 was that the Bulls and Sharks had such successful campaigns and so we were very well prepared for the World Cup. If you’ve got a SuperRugby title-chase to focus on, then the World Cup doesn’t become a distraction and SuperRugby was the best platform and preparation for our win in France.

“I hope it’s the same case this year and we have two or three teams right up there because you’re playing against the guys you have to beat at the World Cup. The players should go out intending to win SuperRugby this year and your best-performing players should be the Springboks. That’s what happened in 2007, we had the guys to win the World Cup and they were confident and well-prepared from SuperRugby,” Smit said.

The former Springbok captain is also hoping that Sharks rugby emerges from an unhappy 2013 in which crowd numbers dropped dramatically at King’s Park in response to an unpopular non-possession based game plan employed by Jake White.

“We’re still 14% behind on our season ticket sales but I’d like to see more than 30 000 people at King’s Park on Saturday for our opening game against the Cheetahs. Time will tell, it’s a big challenge, but we’ve been working hard on our marketing, getting the fans closer to the players, having open days and more interaction, whereas they were removed before.

“We had a good squad last year and we could have won the competition, but the environment possibly wasn’t good enough. This year we have an even better squad and a better environment,” Smit said.

The “better environment” is mostly due to Smit letting go of White in what must have been a tough decision for South Africa’s longest-serving Test captain to make; fortunately he has found a top-class replacement in Gary Gold, a former Springbok assistant coach.

“It’s been a pretty seamless transition and Gary has put in place such instrumental plans. He, Brendan Venter and defence coach Michael Horak were all at London Irish together and Gary has fitted in as if he’s been here the whole time.

“So there’s nothing too new happening with the team, Gary understood the vision and his arrival has certainly been a positive,” Smit said.

In terms of the Sharks’ SuperRugby rivals, Smit expects a fierce derby against the Cheetahs this weekend, even though their small pool of players means they will find it hard to maintain a challenge throughout the competition, while the Stormers have a history of success behind them.

But Smit is most concerned by the Bulls, who he says have been able to gather a powerful squad together in Pretoria.

“The Bulls are going to pose a far bigger challenge this year. In the last two or three years, they’ve come a long way, quietly going about their business, and they’ve made some key signings, especially those three Free Staters who will have a massive impact in the pack.

“Pierre Spies is back off the bench and, in the meantime, Victor Matfield will captain the side. Not too many squads have that sort of depth of leadership,” Smit said.