Ken Borland

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The Cell C Sharks will play an attacking brand of rugby in next year’s SuperRugby competition because the strength of their squad demands it, new director of rugby Gary Gold told The Citizen yesterday.

Gold will continue the Sharks’ elusive search for a maiden SuperRugby title after one season under Jake White that saw them lose in the semi-finals but also alienate many supporters with a conservative game plan.

The former Springbok assistant coach says, with the talent at their disposal, the Sharks will simply have to be more ambitious. Gold inherits a mighty pack featuring half-a-dozen Springboks and an exciting backline bursting with playmakers like Cobus Reinach, Pat Lambie, Odwa Ndungane, JP Pietersen and Lwazi Mvovo.

“One of the characteristics of a winning team is that they score tries and we’re not going to beat New Zealand teams 9-6 with three penalties, so we have to score tries. It’s easier said than done and I’m not a rugby romantic, but the Sharks are lucky to have a great squad of players so we can aspire to a brand of rugby that means scoring tries.

“We’ll still look to play in the right areas of the field, there will be a level of pragmatism, but our starting point is that we’re going to put a lot of time and energy into our attack so we can score tries. You have to tailor-make your game-plan to the players at your disposal, but with this great squad we simply have to embrace more attacking skill,” Gold said.

Gold, who was appointed by the Sharks two weeks ago, said all the pre-season planning for SuperRugby was in place, with the squad training from November 17-December 17 and then gathering together again on January 5. While the experienced Currie Cup, Premiership and Japanese league coach is inheriting a star-studded squad, he said he will be looking to make small-scale changes.

“There won’t be much recruitment, but there are two or three positions we’ve identified where we need more strength in depth, which will be important when you consider the demands of the competition. Another of the reasons champion teams are successful is that the difference between their first-choice and second-choice player in any position is not so big that it makes a difference to the performance of the team,” Gold said.

The 47-year-old is also a proponent of a rotation policy, which should avoid the burnout that seemed to afflict the Sharks towards the end of this year’s SuperRugby campaign.

“Another characteristic of successful SuperRugby and Premiership sides is that they embrace a rotation policy. A first-choice player can start for three weeks and then you can give him three days off because he knows he’ll be coming off the bench for 30 minutes the next weekend. He knows he’s still the number one in his position but he’ll appreciate the break and will be a better performer when he comes back because of it. I’m personally not a big believer in playing people into the ground,” Gold said.

The new director of rugby confirmed that the three coaches who guided the Sharks through the Currie Cup – Brad Macleod-Henderson, Sean Everitt and Paul Anthony – would serve as his assistants before taking the reins again for next year’s Currie Cup.

With Brendan Venter on board as a consultant and plans to bring an overseas attack consultant to Durban for a short while later this year, Gold is keen on getting different ideas into the system.

“As the director of rugby, it’s very difficult to coach and deal with recruitment, agents or budgets towards the end of the year and I also want to support the junior team coaches. Hopefully I’ll get a really good working relationship going with Brad, Sean and Paul in SuperRugby and I want us to get together with all the coaches, as a group, and shoot the breeze or share ideas. The U19 coach might have ideas that will work with the senior team … ” Gold said.

Currie Cup rugby players, franchise cricketers and Premiership footballers will dominate the sporting headlines this weekend, but some of them will take time to think back and remember the largely anonymous people operating at amateur level who made such a big difference to their careers.

Similarly, I will remember this last week for the two reminders it gave me of the many people toiling out of love for the game rather than money. In the sports journalists’ industry, we tend to focus on the small elite triangle at the top of the pyramid, while the thousands of amateur and social players and administrators that are the base – the very foundation – are largely ignored.

Take David Bagg, Gordon Brews and Mike Klatz.

At great personal expense and effort, they have restored Huddle Park, the famous Johannesburg municipal golf course, to its former glory; how successful they have been is borne out by the Sunshine Tour hosting their annual – and hugely popular – Media Challenge there this week.

In the last two years they have taken a derelict, overgrown property that had been abandoned by the City of Johannesburg and turned it into a friendly, first-class facility. They had to remove numerous squatters to do so, but they have employed over 80 people and are providing training in greenskeeping and hospitality, as well as once again providing a cheap pay-and-play option (R190pm membership, as little as R90 for a midweek round) for the public who want to get into golf but cannot afford the exorbitant membership fees of the established clubs.

Apart from restoring one of the most popular courses in Johannesburg – between 150 000 and 200 000 rounds of golf were played at Huddle Park annually in the 1970s – to its rightful place, the trio have also developed a mashie course, a floodlit driving range, a coaching academy, restaurant and sports bar, function venues, walking trails and even a trout-fishing dam as tie-ins.

Future plans include a mountain bike trail, cycle track, zip-lining facility, eco park, gym, beer and food festivals and arts and crafts expos as the Public Private Partnership provides a fun space for the community.

Many Johannesburg golfers learnt the game on the spacious fairways of Huddle Park and it is great news that the 75-year-old parkland green lung will continue for many more years.

Bad news I received this week was the passing on of Dave Edmondson, a legendary figure in KwaZulu-Natal sport who played an important part in setting me on my path to sports journalism as a career.

In 1992, when I was on the University of Natal Pietermaritzburg sports executive, I approached Dave, who was the head of sport, to find out what careers were available in sport (sadly, actually making it on the field wasn’t going to be an option!).

He suggested writing about sport and he approached another legend, John Bishop, at The Natal Witness and six months later my career was launched.

The University of Natal sports department did not have nearly as many resources as the likes of Tuks, Maties or UCT, but Dave gathered together some tremendous sportsmen and women during his time – Jonty Rhodes, Mark Andrews and Greg Nicol being amongst the most famous of them.

During his own playing days, Dave represented Natal and South African Universities as a hockey goalkeeper, played Natal U19 rugby and was a premier league cricketer. He went on to become a Natal cricket selector, the president of the Maritzburg Cricket Association and an honorary life president of KZN cricket.

But the mark of the man was the time he was willing to spend – for little material reward – enhancing the careers of others. A nicer man you couldn’t hope to meet and the encouragement and assistance he gave many future stars as a coach, schoolmaster and administrator is the point of sport, even if his name was not at the top of the triangle.

The Springboks versus All Blacks rugby Test at Ellis Park last weekend counted as one of the greatest sports events I have been to and I felt immensely proud not just because our national rugby team won, but also because of the way they played and the way they carried themselves after the long-awaited triumph over their greatest rivals.

Even if one is not impressed by the way New Zealand and South Africa are steering rugby in a bright new direction of high-tempo play, the wonderful spirit shown between the two teams and the obviously high respect they hold each other in, must gladden the heart of all who love sport for the character-building effects it can have.

The wonderful gesture made by the All Blacks in Wellington when Richie McCaw handed over gifts to Bryan Habana and Jean de Villiers for playing their 100^th Tests will live long in the memory. The fact that nothing of that sort happened in Australia probably says more about the special relationship between the Springboks and All Blacks rather than any deficiencies on the Wallabies’ part.

But if the Springboks are going to win over even more hearts and minds – it is clear that still not everyone in South Africa believes they represent them – then perhaps they should take a leaf out of the book of their cricket counterparts who launched their ProteaFire campaign this week to some fanfare.

A huge part of the Proteas’ success in recent years has been due to the calibre of people in the team – the likes of Graeme Smith, Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers, Faf du Plessis, JP Duminy, Dale Steyn, Ryan McLaren, Morne Morkel and Vernon Philander are all fantastic human beings – and the Springboks also have some fantastic leaders of men in their ranks, Jean de Villiers, Victor Matfield, Tendai Mtawarira, Adriaan Strauss, Duane Vermeulen, Francois Louw, Bryan Habana and JP Pietersen springing readily to mind.

Rugby will be facing their own World Cup challenge next year, but they will also be tested off the field with sponsors cutting back and transformation issues still bedevilling them.

Whether ProteaFire will help the cricketers finally win their World Cup remains to be seen but what is certain is that most of the population will be firmly behind them.

ProteaFire emphasises the importance of putting the team ahead of the individual and the concept of Ubuntu is a key part of Graeme Smith’s vision that started in 2007. Cricket is often, because of its tradition of statistics, a very individual game and one would have thought rugby, perhaps the greatest of team sports, would have been quicker to implement this sort of mission statement of what playing for the national side really means.

For the cricketers, their diversity will be their strength and rugby probably isn’t quite there yet.

Another important aspect of ProteaFire is that it is almost a contract the national team have signed with their supporters in terms of what is expected of them, on and off the field. As Hashim Amla pointed out, this does not mean treating players like babies.

“On the field, emotions can run high and nobody’s perfect. It’s not about having 15 saints, everybody’s different and it’s about getting the strengths of all 15 players together and dealing with any fallouts,” Amla said.

One cannot help but come to the conclusion that the current turmoil wreaking havoc in English cricket is born out of their failure to deal properly with issues of team culture and identity.

Kevin Pietersen can be a brat, but there have been difficult cricketers before who have been allowed to enjoy the middle of the spotlight while still contributing to the team success.

Last Saturday night at Ellis Park and Thursday night in the SuperSport studios were two proud evenings because it showed South African sports teams are getting it right.

Former Bordeaux-Begles president Kevin Venkiah has been in Mauritius for 10 years and has been able to watch rugby on the small Indian Ocean island steadily grow, such that there are now 1,200 registered players.

Venkiah has been the Rugby Union of Mauritius (RUM) president since March 2013 and he is at the helm during exciting times. As with many former African colonies, rugby in Mauritius was dogged by perceptions that it was white and elitist.

“People think that only white people play rugby,” Venkiah says. “When I arrived in Mauritius, 95 per cent of the team was white but we are trying to change the minds of the local communities and make rugby multi-cultural. Our teams now have this. They are mixed, probably 60/40 but we want to get it to 50/50.”

With Venkiah’s excellent French connections – he is very close to the Castres Olympique club – he is able to use visiting players from that great European league to inspire more Mauritian youngsters to take up rugby.

“We have players from clubs like Toulouse, internationals like Pieter de Villiers and Thierry Dusautoir, coming to Mauritius and they spend half-a-day at a coaching clinic. When the youngsters see these stars, they want to play like them. Rugby is not as important as soccer on Mauritius, but it will be in the future,” Venkiah says.

Now ranked in top eight within Africa

What has caught the eye about Mauritian rugby recently has been the promotion of their national side from Africa Cup Division 1C to 1B with victory in their tournament in Botswana in June, meaning they are now ranked in the top eight in Africa and will be playing alongside teams like the Ivory Coast, Senegal and Madagascar.

They beat Zambia 54-17 and overwhelmed Swaziland 134-0, one of the top five highest scores ever recorded in a rugby international, following a creditable 61-17 defeat at the hands of semi-pro South African club champions Rustenburg Impala, who only led 21-10 at half-time.

Both Mauritius and Botswana finished on 10 points in the tournament but the hosts had been beaten 54-9 by Rustenburg and could only beat Swaziland 87-0 and Zambia 66-14, therefore giving Mauritius the title and promotion on points difference. 

“Next year we will be in Africa Cup 1B and we would like to stay there for one or two years because that is our time to grow up. Everybody wants to play in the Rugby World Cup and, if we ever qualified, we would be the first Mauritian team sport to participate in a world championship. We have a very young national team at the moment, averaging about 23 or 24 years old. So in five years’ time they will be ready for the Rugby World Cup 2019 in Japan. We will play for that.” 

In order to improve the national team, RUM has encouraged its top young players to follow the many other youngsters going abroad to study and then come home and share their knowledge and experience.

Learn overseas, come back with experience

“We want people to go abroad to play, we push them to go and grow with foreign teams and then come back with experience,” Venkiah says.

RUM has just registered to take part in the IRB’s hugely successful mass-participation programme, ‘Get Into Rugby’ and is on the verge of launching its three-year strategic plan to grow the game in the various communities around the country. It is also looking to jazz up a rather monotonous schedule that has seen Mauritius only travelling for the Africa Cup. Venkiah wants them to take on several foreign clubs as well as the likes of Singapore and Mozambique.

But speaking to this insurance and investment manager is not just a monologue about the Mauritius national team. Venkiah is passionate about growing the grassroots structures that will make the current success sustainable. It’s been a formidable challenge getting into Mauritian schools but progress is being made.

“It’s very hard to get rugby into the schools but little by little we are getting there. We started with the public schools and we give them training for eight weeks and then they have a little tournament. Recently there was a tournament with 150 kids playing and 25 of those have gone straight into clubs,” Venkiah reveals.

Rugby was not introduced to Mauritius by the French but rather by the English, through their army in the early 1900s. In 1928, the game was taken up by Franco-Mauritians and for nearly 50 years there were seven major clubs on the island of little more than 2,000 square kilometres.

The Dodos survived!

But the roots were shallow and, after independence in 1968, the clubs began closing because they had no junior players. Ironically, it was the Dodos club who were left as the sole survivors.

But in the 1990s, youngsters who had been to study in South Africa, England, France and Australia began to bring rugby back to the island and television coverage of the memorable Rugby World Cup 1995, hosted and won by South Africa, also helped create a market for the game.

“One day, we will have six or seven big clubs again and that would make for a very good championship. But at the moment we have four first division clubs and six in the second division, as well as three women’s clubs,” Venkiah says.

“We have also set up four coaching centres and we are playing rugby in the north, on the east coast and in the centre of Mauritius.”

CAR and IRB are supporting Mauritius

The prices of sporting infrastructure means this has not been an easy task for RUM and Venkiah is grateful for the assistance they have received.

“We are a very poor federation in Mauritius but we have made a lot of progress and it’s great to get recognition for that. The International Rugby Board has given us a lot of help, including getting us into full membership,” Venkiah says.

“The Confederation of African Rugby (CAR) has also been very supportive. We have made a lot of progress and it has recognised that. Maybe even one day it can have its congress in Mauritius!” 

And with its combination of tropical beaches, friendly people and engaging rugby, there are many worse places to hold such a prestigious gathering.
 http://www.irb.com/newsmedia/regional/newsid=2073178.html