Ken Borland

Springbok captain Siya Kolisi manned up to the recent problems his team have been having on the field with an heroic individual effort against the All Blacks on Saturday, so it was little surprise that he was very much in touch with his emotions after a match in which he gave so much but still ended on the losing side, thanks to a late New Zealand penalty.

The flanker dashed around the field with focused intensity on Saturday and was particularly useful at the breakdowns, doing a lot of the dirty work as he and Kwagga Smith formed a great partnership. But as much as he led from the front, Kolisi was not able to drag his team across the line as they went down 17-19.

“It definitely hurts. We prepared as well as we could, we were focused on the right now. I felt on the field that we were in there with a good chance, our set-pieces dominated. So it is really hard to lose a game like that, but we know that if we stick to our processes then the results will come.

“We wanted to stand up and fight today. We knew as a team what we are capable of and it was about making sure we played properly. New Zealand brought high speed and physicality, but I can’t fault my team – our plan worked, our structures were really good. So I don’t really know what went wrong,” Kolisi said after the match.

Many critics have pointed to the Springboks’ decision, after they had taken a 17-16 lead into the last 10 minutes, to kick front-foot ball away, including two up-and-unders from the All Blacks’ 22, as the reason for their defeat. Kolisi said this was the choice of the players and he stood by the tactic.

“The players made that call, we decided to stick to the game-plan. That’s how we know how to play and we will never change from that. And it had been working all day,” Kolisi said.

Depending on who you believe, Proteas assistant coach Enoch Nkwe’s disillusionment and desire to resign from his post were products of being sidelined from important management decisions and ill-discipline within the squad, or his reluctance to keep travelling with the team and instead become more involved in the strategic side of the national team.
Cricket South Africa confirmed on Monday aternoon that Nkwe had “signalled an intention to resign” and the Board is currently consulting with the assistant coach on his future.
A journalist known for his campaign against current head coach Mark Boucher broke the news of Nkwe’s resignation and quoted “insiders” and “sources” as saying the reasons were that his work environment had become a “contaminated space”, with him feeling sidelined and not involved in the decision-making of the team. The report also said Nkwe is not happy with the discipline of certain senior players and some members of management.
But other sources have said Nkwe is hesitant to travel and wants to become more involved in the long-term strategic and technical future of the national team.
Whether it is due to divisions within Proteas management or Nkwe wanting a different role, it is a major blow to CSA’s hopes of grooming Nkwe to take over as head coach after Boucher.
Which is why the Board did not initially accept his resignation and have instead initiated emergency talks with the 38-year-old in order to keep him in the CSA cricket structures.
With the Proteas due to leave on Wednesday for a tour of Sri Lanka, their final dress rehearsal before the T20 World Cup, it is not the sort of disruption or potentially divisive situation that the team needs.
The Proteas will already be taking on Sri Lanka without their regular bowling coach in Charl Langeveldt, who is still quarantining after testing positive for Covid. Titans head coach Mandla Mashimbyi replaces him, and it is his second tour with the national team, having stood in for Nkwe on the West Indies trip in June/July.
Nkwe missed that tour for “family reasons”. Or were there other forces at play?

Cricket South Africa’s Social Justice and Nation-Building hearings are set to resume on Monday and now those implicated in the first three-and-a-half weeks of testimony will get the chance to sell their side of the story to the ombudsman, Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza.

So far the SJN hearings have been anything but boring as nearly 50 respondents have come before Ntsebeza and his fellow advocates and testified with great zeal about how they have been hurt or discriminated against by the game of cricket in this country.

Unfortunately, numerous critics and commentators have been a bit slow to realise that we have only heard one side of the story thus far. None of this evidence has been tested or cross-examined, but that hasn’t stopped sensational headlines and vicious social media attacks being made.

While many of the stories of hurt were eloquently and movingly presented, sadly some people abused the process to continue the campaign against CSA director of cricket Graeme Smith and Proteas coach Mark Boucher, making them the focus of their presentations. As if Smith and Boucher are personally responsible for all the awful things that happened in the 1990s and 2000s. And, judging by some of the hysterical reaction, they would already be locked away in a cell before being allowed to give evidence according to certain people’s idea of how justice works.

Discrimination based on race is what the SJN is looking for, but several of the complaints around selection ignore the fact that Linda Zondi was national convenor of selectors at the time, or Russell Domingo was the Proteas head coach. So is it Black people being discriminatory or are we going to deny both these great cricket servants their agency and say they were merely stooges for the few White people involved in the running of cricket at the time?

Omphile Ramela, the former president of the players’ association, has been one of the most vocal voices claiming rampant discrimination in cricket. His personal complaints centred around him no longer being contracted by the Highveld Lions as a batsman and for CSA turning down his application to succeed Zondi as the convenor of selectors. Enoch Nkwe was the Lions coach who decided not to renew his contract and Victor Mpitsang was rightfully given the job of selection convenor, given his broad knowledge of the players in the system through both his coaching and commentary work.

There are many witnesses who have every right, however, to be angry about how they were treated, especially in the earlier days of unity. Selection frustrations are always a part of cricket though and a player not being selected cannot automatically be ascribed to racism. While Khaya Zondo was no doubt embittered by what happened to him in India in 2015, it is probably true that the only South African cricketer who was definitely dropped from the Proteas XI due to the colour of his skin was Kyle Abbott in the World Cup debacle earlier that year.

Watching our gloriously transformed and brilliant Springboks in action and listening to the painful SJN Hearings around the same time, I cannot help but feel it is the strict quotas in cricket that have caused much of the anger, strife and bitterness.

Rugby has never had quotas as strictly enforced and their transformation has been more organic. And to try and paint them as ‘targets’ in cricket is totally disingenuous – if they were just targets then why was Ashwell Prince, according to his own testimony, hauled before a CSA disciplinary committee after failing to meet the requirements on one occasion as Cape Cobras coach?

White players, who lose their places in the team due to quotas, are naturally upset and wonder if the player replacing them is there on merit. This unhappiness has now extended to Coloured and Indian cricketers and is not good for changeroom morale.

The other side of the coin is that Black players also wonder if they are in the team on merit (as the majority are), and that type of self-doubt is lethal in a sport like cricket which relies so much on confidence and self-belief.

There was bad news on Tuesday for those critics who are for some reason disappointed in the spectacle provided by the series between South Africa and the British and Irish Lions because Springboks coach Jacques Nienaber said their next opponents – Argentina – are a side that is very adept at closing down the game as well.

The magnitude of the occasion typically led to three arm-wrestles, beautifully intense and gripping in their own way, between the Springboks and the Lions, who both favoured fairly conservative game-plans. Nienaber warned that playing against Argentina is going to be far from a free-for-all with the shackles released.

“Argentina are a tough team to play against, they have the ability to disrupt your flow as a team, they are really good at that. They have good plans that can really upset you. They are tactically astute and smart, they have a phenomenal defence and a great kicking game. They can also attack and score from turnovers, they have very quick wings and can create some magic.

“They are physical, defensively well-organised and willing to put their heads in dark places. They are well-balanced across the board, quality players playing for each other. Since the Rugby World Cup they have played seven Tests, six of them against big countries like New Zealand, Wales and Australia, and their only loss was to the All Blacks. Their world ranking [7^th] does not reflect how good they are,” Nienaber said on Tuesday.

While those who are bitter over the Springboks’ success have decried the quality of rugby played in the Lions series, Nienaber, enjoying the sweet taste of victory, said rugby had been the winner.

“It was tight! We’re very grateful for the series victory, the tour is such a special thing, happening only once over 12 years, and it could have gone both ways. It was a grind, but it’s the second biggest event in rugby after the World Cup. It was a humdinger of a series, which is what you want. In my opinion, rugby was the winner and there was only three points separating the teams at the end.

“The beauty of rugby is that there are different styles of playing, it would be unbelievably boring if we all played the same way. That means there are different tactics, like we had to employ at the World Cup going from Japan to Wales to England as opponents in the knockouts. The style teams play is determined by the athletic attributes of their players, you create a game-plan to amplify those characteristics,” Nienaber pointed out.