Ken Borland

“This just reaffirms what I’ve been saying about having a team together for a long time and being able to prepare properly – then you have a chance to win,” was coach Jake White’s response to his makeshift Bulls side being hammered 44-14 by the Pumas in their Currie Cup match in Nelspruit at the weekend.

Given the thoroughly unusual week they had, it was always going to be an uphill task for the youthful Bulls outfit to beat a fired-up Pumas side. Having emerged from their Covid outbreak, the Bulls had to play the Lions in a crucial clash in midweek with a weakened team. But they managed to sneak a win over their Gauteng neighbours, thereby ensuring they would finish top of the log.

They then had to wait 48 hours before they could do Covid testing again, leaving precious little time before Sunday’s match with the Pumas. White was always going to wrap his first-choice players in cotton-wool before their semi-final against the Lions on January 23, but he would have liked more time to prepare the largely U21 side he threw into action at the Mbombela Stadium.

“It was always going to be tough having just one training session together with this team, a guy like replacement flank Divan Venter only trained with us for 20 minutes because Nizaam Carr pulled out on the Friday. We’ve brought much better teams to Nelspruit and struggled, and this was a very new squad. But it’s never nice losing and I did hope for a better performance.

“I was pleased with the 7-10 score in the second half, but it was not ideal to go 31-0 down after the first 25 minutes. But all credit to the Pumas, we wanted to get those early points but they did it to us instead. They’ve been in Lockdown for a long time and made huge sacrifices, so it’s nice for them to get some reward. They should have won against some much better teams than what we brought here this time,” White admitted.

White said the best thing to come out of the game was that here were no injuries and now his team have the better part of two weeks to prepare for the knockout stages. The halfback pairing of Morne Steyn and Ivan van Zyl were probably the only two players who started against the Pumas and are likely to feature in the semi-final, and they were pulled off the field at halftime.

“The most important thing is that we didn’t get any injuries, which is quite nice. I was worried that we would lose one or two players, which is why Elrigh Louw and Johan Grobbelaar didn’t get on and Lizo Gqoboka only had limited time. I wanted to give Morne Steyn some game time and confidence, but two weeks out from a semi-final, you just don’t want the guys to get injured.

“I didn’t want to risk anyone and fortunately there were no injuries. I had still hoped we would be more competitive, like we were in the second half, but you’ve got to pay your school fees and a guy like Jan-Hendrik Wessels maybe lost just one game in his whole Grey College school career. But now we need to win our last two games, we’ve worked hard for a home semi-final and we have not lost at home yet,” White said.

GolfRSA chief executive Grant Hepburn on Friday extended an olive branch to all those in the golf industry who have been without work and frustrated golfers unable to play, saying the organisation’s patient approach to government had paid off as clubs and courses can now open for both amateurs and professionals.

The Department of Sports, Arts and Culture announced on Friday that any member of a federation, agency, club or body may begin playing golf again from Saturday, subject to certain regulations. Clubs need to complete the Confirmation of Compliance Document and submit it to GolfRSA before they can open their facilities.

“These have been incredibly difficult times with the stress of Lockdown and the number of jobs lost, and we have been aware of the frayed tempers and frustrations. We have been in the same boat with friends and colleagues losing work. But we just had to be patient, we knew government were listening to us and they had given us assurances. But it’s been a very complex time and a massive challenge for golf bodies.

“But we believed in the process we were following with the Department, they were always extremely positive and the whole way through they engaged with us in the right way. We wanted to do the right thing and we needed to wait for the new directives. The most important priority is to save lives and mitigate the risk, and the time it has taken us has allowed us to prepare and put things in place at the clubs,” Hepburn said on Friday.

The CEO warned however that golfers could not just rush out on Saturday and expect everything to be back to normal; the golf industry, which contributes R48 billion to the South African economy, would take time to become a well-oiled machine again.

“The job is not yet done, this is not about celebrating. It’s a step in the right direction but there are still many people involved in golf who still can’t put food on their table. So I hope people continue to support clubs and I know our golfers and clubs will be responsible when it comes to the scanning and the monitoring process. Through the HealthDocs app we’ve bought for all clubs, information can be sent back to government at the push of a button.

“We need to control the numbers of golfers and the times they arrive and leave, but it’s time to get busy now with saving golf clubs through the safe return of golfers, which will generate the income for them to survive and save thousands of jobs, especially of those in the vulnerable sector, which makes up 85% of the industry. We know our clubs can comply and sport can help government because exercise is good at reducing comorbidities,” Hepburn said.

Cricket South Africa CEO Haroon Lorgat on Monday defended the absence of transformation quotas in the T20 Global League, saying it was a risk that had paid off with 55 players of colour amongst the 144 players chosen in the draft, including 19 Black Africans.

“We did debate having targets but we decided not to because we have a bottom-up approach with our hubs and schools. It was a risk but we want to see our players come through naturally and it was very pleasing to see Black players chosen as some of the best-paid by people who had no compulsion to do so.

“It shows that our system is working, foreign coaches wanting those players is what we are aiming for. We will not relent in terms of our development of Black players either, because your market is where your majority is and you don’t have to be a professor of economics to understand that. We’re doing it the hard way, from the bottom up,” Lorgat said on Monday.

The CEO and tournament director Russell Adams announced the fixtures for the T20 Global League on Monday in Cape Town, with 57 games being played over six weeks. With each team playing the other seven franchises home and away, that means there will be no playoffs but the top two teams after the league phase will go straight into the final at the Wanderers on Saturday, December 16.

With Johannesburg guaranteed the final for the foreseeable future, it means Cape Town will host the opening game, between the Knight Riders and the Pretoria Mavericks, on Friday, November 3, at least this year.

“In future the opening match will be played at the home of the winners of the previous year’s tournament. We also had a big debate about where to stage the final, but there are logistical challenges around having it in Cape Town around December 16 – there’s the World Sevens Series tournament and everyone is on holiday.

“Wanderers has a bigger capacity and there are more flights and accommodation available in Johannesburg. And we are looking to make the final at one host venue a fixture of the tournament which means people can do their planning, they can even make their bookings for the Wanderers on December 16, 2020,” Lorgat said.

“We also had debates about playoffs and semi-finals, but the league is the reason for the competition and we wanted to reward the two best sides with a place in the final, otherwise a team could come through at the expense of someone who’s had a great league season.”

https://citizen.co.za/sport/south-africa-sport/sa-cricket-sport/1630775/csa-defends-lack-of-formal-quotas-in-t20-global-league/

The Sharks will be eager to put a torrid 2015 behind them as they begin pre-season training for 2016, director of rugby Gary Gold saying they will be looking to start a new era of success for the KwaZulu-Natal side.

“Everyone’s had a good break so now we need to hit the ground running. I hope this young side will be energetic and enthusiastic, because I see this as a new era and I’m certainly excited, keen to put the last year behind us as quickly as possible,” Gold told The Citizen before the Sharks started their pre-season training on Tuesday.

Despite his optimism, Gold conceded that there would be no quick-fix solution to the problems that bedevilled the Sharks in 2015, which saw them finish 11^th in Super Rugby and fifth in the Currie Cup.

“It’s very important to make it clear that we won’t be making any excuses, our performance simply wasn’t good enough, especially for a franchise as big as the Sharks. But an era was coming to an end, we lost a lot of stalwarts and it’s not ideal having four coaches in 18 months at the same time. Change hit us hard and we also had insurmountable injuries, but the bottom line is that the performance was poor,” Gold said.

While Gold is firmly in the camp that favours South African rugby moving forward towards a more free-flowing style, he says defence will be the focus in terms of their Super Rugby preparations.

“Of course I want us to be more of a threat with ball in hand, but defence is the foundation of every good team. I know it’s not romantic, but you learn a lot about a team by how hard they work for each other in defence. We were substantially better in the Currie Cup, our points difference of only -8 shows that, but we need to put pressure on the opposition through our defence.

“A lot of tries these days still come from turnovers, mistakes and poor kicks, and we need to try and force those through our defence. But we also need to be more clever and, strategically, to think more out of the box. Robert du Preez [the new assistant coach] also ticks a lot of boxes for us, he’s a hard taskmaster and there are no half-measures with him,” Gold said.