Ken Borland

George Coetzee is once again atop the leaderboard at Pretoria Country Club after shooting a five-under-par 67 in the first round of the Titleist Championship on Wednesday, but the seasoned pro of 13-and-a-half years’ standing was joined later in the day on the same score by rookie Hennie O’Kennedy.

The 34-year-old Coetzee has been winning tournaments at Pretoria Country Club since he was 10 years old and won two of his four European Tour titles here  – the Tshwane Opens of 2015 and 2018. And his bogey-free round on Wednesday put him one ahead of another rookie in Clayton Mansfield and two ahead of Sunshine Tour stalwarts Jaco Ahlers and Merrick Bremner.

But Coetzee warned that the fact he feels right at home on the parklands layout is no guarantee of ultimate success.

“It’s nice to be back here on a golf course I’m very comfortable on. I played with Ulrich van den Berg [74] today and he said to me, ‘You just know where to go here’, and after the round I thought, ‘Ja, I kind of do know where to go on this golf course’. If you play well and you’re in a good space, it helps.

“But there’s no such thing as a gimme in golf. If that was the case I would’ve won every tournament I’ve played at Pretoria Country Club, and I obviously haven’t. But it’s nice to finally get my first bogey-free round in tournament golf post-Lockdown, I haven’t expected much and I didn’t deliver much in the Series so far. It’s nice to finally post a decent number,” Coetzee said.

The Titleist Championship is the third 54-hole event of the Rise Up Series, a five-event schedule that represents the rising up of professional golf on many fronts, and O’Kennedy is one of several new faces marketing themselves as the potential future stars of South African golf.

O’Kennedy turned pro last year and enjoyed an excellent campaign on the Big Easy Tour, winning at Crown Mines and enjoying four other top-10 finishes. On Wednesday, as he celebrated his 24th birthday, O’Kennedy collected seven birdies and dropped just one shot on each of the nines in just his third Sunshine Tour event.

“It was a lovely birthday present and shooting in the 60s is always nice, it means there’s a bit less pressure in terms of making the cut. It was quite nice conditions today, not hot and not windy, although the cold weather meant we had to work on an extra three metres for every shot.

“I guess I am a big-hitter and that gave me a slight advantage in that I had short-irons coming in to the par-fives. But the layout of this course is so good, especially the par-fours, that you have to really think about your tee-shot. You can’t just take Driver everyhwere and you need to keep out of the bunkers.

“I think my round today showed that the Big Easy Tour is a great stepping-stone and preparation for the Sunshine Tour. The cut is often 30 players or less, which pepares you better because you’ve got to shoot low. Now I’m going to go home and rest and have some cake. I’ll stay away fom the beer until the tournament is done,” O’Kennedy, who hails from Stellenbosch Golf Club, said.

The monotony of Lockdown has sent many people out to lunch but for Quinton de Kock the same simple ‘see ball, hit ball’ approach that makes him such a great cricketer has seen him get through the winter so far in typically phlegmatic fashion.

Named CSA’s Men’s Cricketer of the Year at the weekend, De Kock said he has not hit a single ball since the end of last season, but is comfortable that there is plenty of time for him to launch a reinvigorated assault on the bowlers of the world.

In 2019/20, De Kock scored 536 runs in seven Tests at an average of 38.28, with one century and four fifties, while he has also averaged 38, with one century and four half-centuries, in 15 ODIs in the last year. He also reached fifty four times in eight T20 Internationals, averaging a remarkable 48.42 at a strike rate of 167.

The left-handed wicketkeeper/batsman scored more Test runs in 2019 than any other Protea (713, 216 more than Faf du Plessis), but has set his sights on scoring more hundreds in the coming season.

“I’ve had the world’s best Lockdown, I’ve been very busy doing nothing. I’ve kept up with my fitness and training in the gym, but I’m based in a very remote place [Garden Route] and there’s not much cricket around here. But practice is mostly muscle memory and there’s still so much time before our next game, you could end up hitting balls for no reason. I needed the break and tried to stay away from cricket.

“But in terms of fulfilling my potential, I would only rank myself about 6.5 out of 10. I had too many starts without progressing, I’m tough on myself and to be honest I’d love to convert those starts into even bigger runs. I wanted to come up the order, I’m happy at five for now and I feel that I can score big hundreds there,” De Kock said after also being named Test Cricketer of the Year and Players’ Player of the Year.

One thing De Kock was adamant about is that he is not going to try and take on the Test captaincy as well as his role as white-ball skipper, wicketkeeper and key batsman.

“Mark Boucher and I had an informal chat and I said I wasn’t sure about the Test captaincy. It would be too much to handle, I realise that now, to be wicketkeeper and captain, I don’t need all that stress, I could see that a mile away,” De Kock said.

Laura Wolvaardt was named the Women’s Cricketer of the Year, largely on the back of her superb performances in steering South Africa to the semi-finals of the ICC World T20 in Australia, and the 21-year-old said the Proteas will try their utmost to do even better in their 50-over World Cup scheduled for January.

“Our main focus has been that ODI World Cup for the last three-and-a-bit years and once we start playing again it will be full steam ahead towards that. The T20 World Cup in Australia will always have a special place in my heart, just the way the team played and the brand of cricket we produced was very special. It was incredible how we performed.

“I definitely did not see all this success coming at all at the start of the season, especially my role at five in the T20s, and I’m very glad it went well. It was the magical idea of the selectors to move me there because I’d had struggles in the powerplay up front. It gave me more freedom once the field was spread, I could rotate the strike a bit more while getting set,” Wolvaardt said.

July 18, 1944 was the day the patent for a combined pepper and salt shaker was issued in the United States and on the same day 76 years later, Cricket South Africa and 3TCricket will look to spice up the game by combining three teams in the same match playing for the Solidarity Cup.

Perhaps a more significant reason to remember July 18, 2020 though will be that that is the day live cricket action will return to South Africa after the 2019/20 season was halted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Having eventually received approval for a return to practice and play from the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture last weekend, CSA on Wednesday announced that the groundbreaking 3TCricket match will now take place on July 18, Nelson Mandela International Day. The event was originally meant to take place on June 27, but government approval was delayed because the venue, SuperSport Park in Centurion, was in a Covid-19 hotspot and CSA’s plans needed to be approved by the Department of Health as well.

Now that the bureaucracy has been satisfied, 3TCricket will still be launched at SuperSport Park, starting at 11am, and the pay-TV channel will also broadcast the action live, with Kagiso Rabada’s Kingfishers looking to bombard Quinton de Kock’s Kites and the Eagles team led by AB de Villiers into submission.

“It’s very exciting to get live cricket, featuring our top players, back on our TV screens again. I can’t think of a more appropriate day on which to hold this game than Nelson Mandela Day when its prime objective is to raise funds for those who have been badly affected by the Corona Virus. It is still nearly three weeks away, so it also gives our players more time to prepare properly and to minimise the chance of injuries.

“I would like to thank the government and our own medical team once again for everything they have done to make a return to training and playing possible, and I would also like to add special thanks to the incredible sponsors involved in this event for their continued commitment towards the match and its beneficiary, the Hardship Fund,” Jacques Faul, CSA’s chief executive, said in a statement released on Wednesday.

The fact that CSA are allowed to stage this event in a hotspot shows just how finely tuned their precautionary measures to mitigate against the risk of infection are.

“First of all it will be an empty stadium, we’re looking at the minimum number of people being there for the event to happen and be broadcast, which is about 200. We will limit the number of team staff, otherwise it will just be the broadcast personnel, officials, players and stadium staff. There will also be thorough cleaning of the stadium beforehand.

“The players will get in three days before and be kept in a sanitized eco-system, at the hotel, when they travel and at the stadium. We will test the players before they get to Centurion and again five days afterwards in order to get rid of any false negatives. On average it takes five days from infection for someone to test positive. In the stadium, everyone will wear masks and doors will be kept open along with other safety measures,” CSA’s chief medical officer Dr Shuaib Manjra said.

Blistering pace and a keen nose for the tryline meant Bryan Habana was like an arrow zeroing in on its target when it came to try-scoring and the Springbok wing holds the records for the World Cup, Tri-Nations/Rugby Championship, the Springboks and for South Africans in SuperRugby. It is heartening to see the 36-year-old show the same acumen now that he has retired and is in the business world.

A graduate of the Toulouse business school, Habana is now the co-founder of Retroviral, a digital sports marketing agency with a strong emphasis on tech. It’s a career move which probably has its roots back in the early 2000s when he signed up for a BSc IT degree at the then Rand Afrikaans University. But then rugby got in the way.

The Covid-19 pandemic has drastically affected everyone’s lifestyles and is likely to force structural adjustments to the economy of just about everything. Sport has been especially hard hit with the global sports industry now projected to face losses of $62 billion.

The Lockdown has also provided much food for thought for entrepreneurs and, typical of the sharp minds of Habana, Mike Sharman and Ben Karpinski, the founders of Retroviral, they have come up with a great new idea that will assist the wellbeing of sportsmen and women as they look to navigate these tumultuous times.

MatchKit.co is a mobile tech platform that allows athletes to build their own website. And not those starchy looking ones that are never updated, have lots of photos that take forever to load and are low on substance.

Within five minutes, sports stars can build themselves a website that highlights their sponsors, automatically integrates into all the big social media channels and provides detailed stats of their engagements on those platforms, has a plug-and-play, secure e-commerce store that will enable them to sell anything from branded merchandise to video or audio shoutouts, and a portal that will enable people to donate to their foundation or favourite charity.

It has often proven a stiff task for sportspeople to promote themselves better, they tend to forget certain sponsors or, in many cases, not even have an Online presence. MatchKit.co certainly appears to be able to overcome these problems.

“I’m extremely excited, MatchKit will add tangible value to athletes and allow them to easily commercialise their brands around the world. I know I was all over the place after our 2007 World Cup win, but MatchKit now allows the athlete to control their commercial rights, it empowers them, while showcasing their sponsors.

“It came about after bouncing ideas off a South African venture capitalist who’s now in the United States and it has a simple set-up. You look at sportspeople Online and not even 10-15% will have their agent’s details there. What if corporates want to engage with them? What happens if they change their agent?” Habana said at the launch this week.

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The great news to come out of the cricketing world in the last week is that the West Indies tour of England looks set to go ahead with the Caribbean squad arriving on Tuesday to quarantine ahead of a three-Test series that will start on July 8. The matches will be played behind closed doors in a bio-secure environment, with the first Test being held in Southampton, followed by two matches at Old Trafford, starting on July 16 and July 24 respectively.

That means the series will end on July 28. South Africa were scheduled to have played their first Test in the West Indies from July 23-27, with the second meant to start on July 31. With a lucrative T20 series against India lined up for the end of August, it now seems likely the Proteas will only meet the West Indians in September and there is still no clarity on whether that series will take place in the Caribbean or in South Africa, or even be moved to a neutral venue like England. The tour of the West Indies was originally meant to be of just over a month’s duration, so it doesn’t look possible to cram in the two Tests and five T20s that were meant to be played even if the Men in Maroon plant themselves in the UK and the Proteas fly over there and quarantine in the second half of July.