Ken Borland

The sands of time have moved quickly at Loftus Versfeld this year and Bulls coach Nollis Marais is already deep into his planning for the new SuperRugby season early next year.

While he confirmed that he is still having “on-going negotiations” with a couple of players with a view to luring them to Loftus Versfeld, Marais said he believes he already has the bulk of the players he needs; it’s just that their talents have previously been buried.

“We will add on a bit to the Currie Cup side and I’m busy working on that, talking to a couple of guys, but we’ve got the players, we just need to develop them. The skills aren’t good enough and there will be a huge emphasis on that. Before I do any game plan, I need to know the execution will be there, so the skills and conditioning need to be better, that’s going to be a huge drive for me,” Marais said.

The newly-appointed SuperRugby coach has his eye on forwards in the main in terms of acquisitions, because with the players at Loftus Versfeld already, the Bulls should have a very exciting backline next year.

“I’ve come a long way with Handre Pollard, we won the Varsity Cup together at Tuks, and he’s an excellent player. I met with him last weekend before he left for Japan and with the way we want to play in future and the way the game is developing, he’s going to have a massive role to play because he’s a brilliant flyhalf. He just needs some freedom around a few things.

“I was the first to try Jesse Kriel at centre, because I rated Duncan Matthews as a very good fullback and they turned an U21 final for me. So we have Duncan and Warrick Gelant at 15, who are both good young fullbacks, and Jesse Kriel can play both, but I like him at 13,” Marais said.

Adding to the backline riches are Springboks Rudi Paige and Bjorn Basson, while in midfield, Marais has tough choices to make at inside centre between Burger Odendaal, Jan Serfontein and Dries Swanepoel.

The minutes of the University of Pretoria cricket club AGM after the 2015/16 season will show that they lost their inspirational coach Pierre de Bruyn after six trophy-filled years, but the former Titans and Dolphins all-rounder’s departure for Leicestershire is a blow for South African cricket as a whole.

De Bruyn confirmed on Wednesday that he will be taking up a post as skills coach and second XI head coach with English county Leicestershire in the new year, therefore ending an association with the Tuks cricket team that saw them win five successive Northerns Premier League titles, three National Club Championships, three University Sports South Africa crowns, the inaugural Varsity Cup for cricket and, just last weekend, they defended their title in the Red Bull Campus Cricket Finals, the world cup of student cricket.

“I cannot thank the University of Pretoria more for the foundation they have given me, they’ve played a massive role in my life in terms of my growth end education. They gave me all the tools I needed for a very successful six years, and they have moulded the person I am.

“But as a young coach, I want to go to the next level, my long-term aim is to be an international coach, and a great opportunity has come my way at Leicestershire. It’s a full-time, permanent position, so I’m moving the whole family. It’s a chance to get into the very powerful structure of county cricket and try and help Leicestershire get back on track. There’s been a lot of change there and I hope I have a massive role to play,” De Bruyn told The Citizen on Wednesday.

One of South Africa’s most promising coaches and a father of two daughters, De Bruyn will work under elite performance director Andrew McDonald, the former Australia, Delhi Daredevils, Bangalore Royal Challengers and Leicestershire all-rounder, and another South African expat, Nic Pothas, is the new academy director.

“It’s a new page for me and if you look at the IPL, or the likes of Graham Ford at Surrey, Dave Nosworthy at Somerset and all the Aussies, having coaches from all over the world is where cricket has gone. I think I’ve shown I can produce and develop players, and I hope to bring discipline and structure to my work at Leicestershire. After six years of great memories, I just want to make sure I continue changing young people’s lives because that’s what I’m passionate about,” De Bruyn said.

Some of the most talented young South African cricketers – Theunis de Bruyn, Aiden Markram and Graeme van Buuren – have passed through his hands at Tuks.

SuperRugby completes the first month of its 2015 season this weekend and it’s not surprising, given the generally low standard of officiating, that the referees and their assistants have been in the spotlight this week.

There has been furious debate about whether the laws of the game were correctly applied at Loftus Versfeld last weekend when the Bulls beat the Sharks; and there is uproar steadily building as well over referee Nick Briant’s performance yesterday in Hamilton, especially towards the end of the Highlanders’ shock win over the Chiefs.

The Loftus Versfeld furore was mostly about Law 12 – the knock-on or throw forward, but perhaps the way to avoid these controversies that do serious damage to the game (nobody wants to watch a sport where the officials decide the outcome rather than the athletes) is to go to Law 6.

This law is about the Match Officials, but nowhere does it say they have to be competent!

In the white-hot arena of top-class rugby, mistakes will inevitably happen and nobody should crucify referees over those. But when a person sitting in a box in the stands gets several replays of an incident and still can’t make the correct decision, then questions need to be asked. The problem is that officials are way above the law and there is no accountability; their decisions never have to be explained. It’s a prime breeding ground for matchfixing, but WorldRugby is in denial of that as well.

The forward pass incident at Loftus has been dressed up as a technical issue involving the direction of the hands being obscured at the time of Jesse Kriel’s pass. TMO Johan Greeff believed the evidence was inconclusive, never mind the ball clearly travelling metres forward on its way to Francois Hougaard. It was such an obvious forward pass that most people picked it up while watching the game live.

If TMOs are going to be seen to have made the correct decision, which is the whole point of having them, then they are going to have to ditch this whole obsession with which direction the hands were going at the time of the pass. None of that technical mumbo jumbo, nothing about gravity or momentum, is even mentioned in the laws of rugby.

Obviously momentum is going to cause a ball to drift forward if the player who passes it is running, but this cannot result in the sort of forward pass Kriel threw to Hougaard.

“A throw forward occurs when a player throws or passes the ball forward. ‘Forward’ means towards the opposing team’s dead ball line,” is all Law 12 states. It’s simple but for several years now officials have conspired to complicate the whole issue with all this talk of “the direction of the hands”.

While they are at it, the lawmakers should also make the ruck laws simpler because, as things stand in this era of “interpretation”, the World Cup final is probably going to be decided by who the referee is.

It cannot be good for the game that the Bulls can have a referee one week (Andrew Lees) who barely blew anything at the ruck and the next week be officiated by somebody who blows to the letter of the law.

Nobody wants to have a game dominated by the officials, but they currently have way too much influence on the result and spectators have started to desert rugby as a result.

The Warriors once again showed their ability to chase down almost anything as they beat the defending champion Titans by two wickets with a ball to spare in a thrilling start to the season in their Momentum One-Day Cup match at Centurion on Friday night.

Having chased down a record 354 in the corresponding fixture last season, the Warriors needed 328 on Friday night and were set on their way by a blazing 101 off just 74 balls by opener Jon-Jon Smuts, who shared a commanding second-wicket stand of 133 off 126 balls with young Yaseen Vallie, who scored 52.

After a horror start in the field, the Titans regrouped and seemed on course for victory when they reduced the Warriors to 230 for six in the 41^st over.

But Simon Harmer and Andrew Birch showed that they have serious pretensions as batsmen as they lashed 89 off the next 50 balls.

Harmer was trapped lbw for 42 by Junior Dala in an excellent penultimate over, umpire Shaun George perhaps being alone in believing the batsman did not get anything on a suspiciously leg-side delivery, and Rowan Richards made a good fist of defending eight in the last over.

The left-armer got it down to three needed off the last two balls when Basheer Walters lashed him powerfully through extra cover for the winning boundary. Birch finished on 55 not out off just 28 balls, a great contribution by the diminutive seamer.

The Titans were indebted to some late heroics themselves after they were sent in to bat, their total being boosted by a phenomenal unbroken fifth-wicket stand of 119 off just 71 balls between Grant Thomson and Qaasim Adams.

Thomson, who was not expected to play a role for the Titans this season but was included for his Momentum One-Day Cup debut because of the unavailability of all-rounders David Wiese, Chris Morris and Albie Morkel, hammered a wonderful 98 not out off 71 balls, while Adams, who has really grown as a finisher for the Titans, produced a fine hand of 65 not out off 39 balls.

The Titans’ decision to promote Mangaliso Mosehle to the opening berth was a partial success, with the wicketkeeper/batsman scoring 49, but needing 81 deliveries to do it. Dean Elgar, who moved down to number four, scored a fluent half-century.

But the Titans failed dismally to produce the basics in the field, Smuts being dropped twice, ground fielding errors costing crucial runs at the death and the bowlers too often being wayward or bowling the wrong lengths.