Ken Borland

Bulls coach John Mitchell’s comments this week about how he is going to set about changing the entire model of how the franchise recruits and develops players reinforces the belief that South African rugby as a whole needs to take ownership of the fact that we are extremely wasteful when it comes to our talent.

The fact that we have so much rugby talent in this country is both a blessing and a curse. The downside of being so well-endowed with athletes is that very little attention is paid to putting systems in place that will get the best out of young players.

One gets the feeling that the current approach of our franchises’ recruitment officers is to just try and buy up as much talent as possible at Craven Week, let nature run its course and hope one or two of them turn into stars.

Contrast this with a country like Australia where rugby union has a small portion of the talent ‘pie’ and whatever players they have, they have to fully invest in them and maximise their potential. Jake White used to joke that if prop Bill Young, who played 46 times for Australia, had to pitch up at Stellenbosch University they would have sent him to the third XV straight away. But the point was that Young was ‘made’ into a solid Test front-ranker, whereas in South Africa he probably would have just disappeared.

By focusing on quantity and not quality, and by just worrying about who is going to play in the provincial U19 and U21 sides rather than developing the actual skills of the players, South Africa have come to the point where their SuperRugby squads are made up of many players who are not good enough to play in the competition, according to Mitchell, a former All Blacks coach.

Rugby in this country needs to stop being so insular and needs to be open to world trends, including those in other sports.

Even I, who usually uses watching football as a sleeping pill, have been impressed by many aspects of the Soccer World Cup and have been thinking how these could translate into the world of rugby union.

By staging a brilliant counter-attack to beat Japan at the death, Belgium produced a magnificent passage of play that was reminiscent of some of the superb tries scored by the All Blacks in recent years.

Any sports lover would have been impressed by Romelu Lukaku’s brilliant running off the ball and his dummy that set up Belgium’s winner; the lesson for rugby players was that often you can have more impact through what you do without the ball than with it.

And the image of football fans as being hooligans has been challenged by the splendid Japanese and Senegalese fans, who embody all that is good about sport, and they even cleaned up afterwards!

I have also been watching hockey this week and their new interpretations surrounding the use of the aerial ball or overhead might provide some help to rugby lawmakers currently grappling with the ball-in-the-air issues that are bedevilling their game.

Hockey have simplified the whole issue by basically saying whoever is under the ball has all the rights and cannot be played until they have the ball under control. Perhaps if the defender under the ball in rugby had similar protection it would limit kicks to being into space only and would eliminate all the aerial contests that are proving so difficult to control.

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Of all the contributions Ali Bacher has made to South African cricket – captain of their first world-beating side, CEO of the United Cricket Board during the drive to Unity, running the successful hosting of the 2003 World Cup – the introduction of the then Bakers Mini-Cricket programme to underprivileged areas was arguably the one with the greatest impact on the future of the game in this country.

So one can understand Bacher feeling a little peeved when a Gauteng Cricket Board president mentioned to him almost 20 years after Bakers Mini-Cricket started that the programme was no longer having the desired outcomes.

“The first time we took cricket to the Black townships was in 1986 with the help of Bakers and within 10 years we had sent someone like Makhaya Ntini to Dale College. In 2003 I left Cricket South Africa and in 2005 the Gauteng Cricket Board president phoned me and said the mini-cricket programme is faltering.

“So I looked at the report and the problem was that any young kid with passion and talent would still not make it if they stayed in the township, because everything was against them there. I went to King Edward VII and when we left high school we were ready to play provincial cricket and Kagiso Rabada had five years of that as well at St Stithians.

“But in the townships there are no grass fields, pitches, nets or covers. There are 27 000 schools in South Africa and they are mostly Black with no facilities because they don’t have money for it. If talented players were identified there then you had to get them quickly to government or private schools that were traditionally good cricket schools,” Bacher explains.

KFC have now taken over the mini-cricket programme and their efforts deserve recognition because they are still a tremendous feeder system. But the approach when it comes to high school pupils has now changed, under the guidance of Bacher and with the support of Blue Label.

As the chief marketing officer of the mobile telecoms innovators, Rob Fleming, explains: “Transformation is absolutely critical and it needs constant love and attention. But what’s the best way of achieving it? I’ve seen multiple ideas and there’s no doubt we need to do a better job.

“Our real strength in South African cricket is our schools, but forty of them probably produce 80% of our players, so is that the right place to develop our cricket? If we take township kids to those schools then often they are not up to it academically and it affects their cricket and the whole scheme collapses.

“So it was Ali’s idea to go to old traditional cricket schools and try and reignite the game there, let’s create another forty top cricket schools. There’s no doubt the talent is there, that’s our conveyor belt and I love how coherently this programme can work with the rest of the system,” Fleming says.

What deters many schools from playing cricket is the time and expense it involves, which is where Blue Label is coming in to provide resources for Focus Schools, three of which (Uitsig, Akasia and Hendrik Verwoerd) were recently named in the Northerns region, joining schools in Johannesburg, Krugersdorp and Vereeniging that are already in the programme.

Cricket is competing heavily with other codes at these schools, and teachers and facilities are few, but by combining resources, their weakness has become a strength.

Our schools are where the rubber hits the tar in terms of capacity building and getting more and more talent into the pipeline.

“Many of these traditionally good cricket schools are now 99% Black so we are completing the circle and Rob is passionate about this as well. We’ve identified government schools that were former White schools and they still have good facilities but cricket was no longer being played. For example, Krugersdorp High School, hardly any cricket was being played; Highlands North used to provide most of the Balfour Park club, who were very good, but there was no longer any cricket there.

“But if we can get cricket back on its feet again in schools like that then I reckon we will see a plethora of good players coming through. Like Queen’s High School which is on the other side of the Jeppe Hill, it’s all Black and their cricket is so good. Their U15 side only lost one match last season and they beat Pretoria Boys High, they are well-dressed and their parents are all there. This will be so good for South African cricket,” Bacher says.

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By a quick calculation, former Northerns cricketer Anton Ferreira has contributed more than 40 years of service to cricket in the province and in South Africa, so it was entirely fitting that the Titans franchise should pay tribute to him when they launched their new refurbished president’s lounge at SuperSport Park on Thursday night.

Ferreira, a quality all-rounder who would go on to represent South Africa in unofficial limited-overs matches in the 1980s, was born in Pretoria and made his debut for Northern Transvaal in 1974. When he retired in 1992, he held the record for most appearances for the province (93 first-class games) and the most runs scored for Northern Transvaal (4290 in first-class cricket).

Ferreira was one of the key figures in the rise of Northern Transvaal from the B Section to A Section contenders in the early 1980s, also taking 235 wickets at an average of 26.91 with his muscular pace bowling.

After his playing days, which included an eight-year stint with Warwickshire, where he was immensely popular, Ferreira went into coaching and just kept on contributing. He initially made his mark at junior and first-class level (with Transvaal) and then took the South African U19 team to two junior world cups. In 2000, he was appointed Cricket South Africa’s director of coaching, which involved a shift into coaching the coaches.

This month, with his job description having evolved into coaching education manager, Ferreira finally retired from CSA, although he is still involved in cricket on a consultancy basis, currently helping the Africa Cricket Association.

“Yogi has done it all in cricket, he has made an incredible contribution to the game, and was one of the people who laid the foundation for our current success as a franchise. What he has done for cricket in this area and around the country during his 18 years with Cricket South Africa has been phenomenal and his passion for the game is what sets him apart. And it was all done without any tendency for self-promotion, you won’t find a more humble, down-to-earth man,” Titans CEO Jacques Faul said in paying tribute to Ferreira.

A typically modest Ferreira said he can never repay the game for all it has given him.

“I am humbled and I can never repay the game for all the wonderful enjoyment it has given me. I learnt, as a young boy, about the game from Northern Transvaal legends like Denis Lindsay, Jackie Botten and Tiger Lance and they taught me about enjoying the pleasure of risk,” Ferreira said.

Ferreira will certainly be missed by Cricket South Africa, but someone with his passion for the game is certainly still going to be around, bringing a smile and wonderful insight to cricket.

South Africa’s 2019 Cricket World Cup fixture list will have some eerie similarities to their infamous 1999 campaign in England, according to a report on the CricInfo website on Wednesday, with the ghosts of Edgbaston combining with their tournament nemesis.

The schedule, which the International Cricket Council board will deliberate over in Kolkata on Thursday, sees South Africa enjoying the honour of playing the opening game of the tournament, against England at the Oval, on Thursday, May 30. It is the same venue at which they beat the hosts by 122 runs in the previous World Cup held in England.

But after that matters get scary with history repeating itself with South Africa once again playing against Australia in their last match before the knockout round, on Saturday, July 6, with one of the semi-finals scheduled for Edgbaston in Birmingham, the scene of their notorious tied semi-final in 1999 that eliminated them from the tournament and created shockwaves that seemed to affect them in every World Cup thereafter.

The Proteas will also have to take on New Zealand, the team that has knocked them out of the last two World Cups, at Edgbaston on Wednesday, June 19.

Although there is a reasonable gap of three-to-five days between all the other Proteas’ games, the proposed schedule states that there will be an awkward eight-day gap between their match against Sri Lanka at Chester-le-Street on Friday, June 28, and their crunch clash with defending champions Australia. That match, as well as their June 15 game against Afghanistan in Cardiff, will be day/night affairs, while England, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka will not play any day/night games in the round-robin phase.

SA fixtures: Thursday, May 30 v England (Oval); Sunday, June 2 v Bangladesh (Oval); Wednesday, June 5 v India (Southampton); Monday, June 10 v West Indies (Southampton); Saturday, June 15 v Afghanistan (Cardiff); Wednesday, June 19 v New Zealand (Edgbaston); Sunday, June 23 v Pakistan (Lord’s); Friday, June 28 v Sri Lanka (Chester-le-Street); Saturday, July 6 v Australia (Old Trafford).