Ken Borland

AB de Villiers & Hashim Amla – South Africa’s two captains in Sri Lanka

South Africa have been gunned down in 13 of their 16 ODIs in Sri Lanka so their brains trust were in no doubt about the daunting task lying ahead of them as they set off for the sub-continental island yesterday.

The Proteas’ tour of Sri Lanka starts with three ODIs from next Sunday, followed by two Tests in Galle and Colombo. South Africa have won two and lost four of the 10 Tests they have played there, so it’s a tough place to tour across the board.

“Sri Lanka know their conditions well and they’re very dangerous at home, especially in the short formats. They’ve done very well in ODIs and T20s in the last five years,” ODI captain AB de Villiers acknowledged yesterday.

“The heat is stifling so even though a place like Hambantota offers more pace and bounce, your fast bowlers have to bowl shorter spells. At Colombo, Galle and Kandy, spin comes into play so that suits their attack.

“And batting in Sri Lanka is anything but easy. There’s turn and the pitches are abrasive so there’s also reverse-swing. And sometimes there’s a bit of movement with the new ball as well, especially at night,” coach Russell Domingo said.

“It’s a tough place to tour because of the conditions and Sri Lanka are playing pretty well at the moment,” Test captain Hashim Amla acknowledged.

Notwithstanding those dire warnings, Domingo said the results at the end of their previous trip to Sri Lanka, when the newly-appointed coach steered them to a 2-1 triumph in the T20 series last August, encouraged him.

“The way we finished last year – we won the T20s which was the first time we had won a shorter-format series over there – showed us what we could achieve over there. It was a strange tour last year, there were a lot of disruptions and injuries. There was no Dale Steyn nor Jacques Kallis and Hashim missed a couple of games as well.”

The return of Kallis will please De Villiers as it will give him much more solidity in the batting line-up, as well as another experienced, proven seam bowler in testing conditions for pacemen.

A top six of Amla, De Kock, Kallis, De Villiers, Duminy and Miller engenders confidence and South Africa will also be taking a better attack to Sri Lanka than last year. Steyn, Morkel, Philander, Kallis, McLaren, Parnell and Hendricks provide a better mix of consistency and striking ability, while Imran Tahir, always a factor on the sub-continent, is likely to be the first-choice spinner.

“Imran had a wonderful 2011 World Cup in similar conditions. He’s an attacking bowler and I’d like to see him get game time and get his confidence going ahead of the Tests,” De Villiers said.

Sri Lanka is the heartland of attacking spinners, however, and Amla said the Proteas will be particularly wary of the unassuming, orthodox left-armer Rangana Herath, fresh from a wonderful tour of England.

“We’ve always viewed Herath as a very good bowler, especially if the pitches are turning. He has a lot of experience and, no disrespect to their seamers, he will be Sri Lanka’s key bowler,” Amla said.

In little more than seven-and-a-half months, South Africa will be involved in another World Cup campaign and Domingo said it is crucial he starts to build confidence within the squad.

“There are still 26 ODIs before the World Cup, so it’s quite a lot of cricket, but we want to get to Australasia with confidence, we want to be one of the teams to beat. We want to get ourselves higher on the rankings. This group is pretty close to what we’ll take to the World Cup,” Domingo said.

The coach said South Africa are likely to play one specialist spinner and JP Duminy in the Tests, leaving the number seven position open for a frontline batsman like Stiaan van Zyl or Quinton de Kock, or another pace bowler with Vernon Philander capable of moving up the order.

“It’s a tough decision and we’ll have to see what conditions are like. But we will always play one frontline spinner and JP, who I see as a frontline spinner anyway. So we have both bases covered – the extra seamer as well as an orthodox off-spinner [Duminy], a young, exciting offie who can bowl the doosra [Dane Piedt] and a leg-spinner [Tahir]. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll play all three of those,” Domingo explained.

South Africa are heading into mid-summer in Sri Lanka this weekend and the heat will well and truly be on, according to Faf du Plessis.

“The first tough thing about touring Sri Lanka is the heat and we’ll be there in mid-summer. On our last tour, we lost four of the five tosses and had to bowl first every time. I’m not even a bowler, although I do keep busy in the field, but for the first time ever, I actually fell asleep in my chair before I batted because I was so drained.

“You’ve got to really have mental strength because you are so exhausted and you need to have an extra tank,” Du Plessis said yesterday at the launch of the IXU brand of cricket equipment, for which he is an ambassador.

And although the Proteas are heading into the sub-continent, Du Plessis said batting in Sri Lanka is significantly harder than in India.

“The pitches are harder to bat on than in India, in some ways they’re between South Africa and India. In India, the turn is low and slow, but in Sri Lanka you get bounce and turn and they have very good spinners. It’s a deadly combination,” Du Plessis said.

The 29-year-old has made an impressive start to his Proteas career, averaging 52.42 after 14 Tests and 34.56 in T20 internationals with a strike rate of 125.96. But his record in ODIs is modest, averaging just 27.55 after 47 games. The vast majority of his Test appearances for South Africa have been at home, with just four Tests abroad, so Du Plessis is eager to improve his performances away from home. He had an awful time last year in Sri Lanka, scoring just 57 runs in the five ODIs.

“I anticipated that Sri Lanka would be a lot like India, but it was an eye-opener. You need to get yourself in, but once you understand the pitch, it becomes easier. But the initial 20 balls are very tough and only then can you cope,” Du Plessis said.

South Africa start the three-match ODI series in the capital Colombo on July 6 and the Titans star said getting in and making starts count would be key factors.

“As a team, we need to focus on making sure that if we get in, then we score 80s or hundreds; 30s and 40s aren’t going to do the job over there. Kumar Sangakkara is a prime example – he scored 372 runs in those five games last year.

“Our game plan’s going to be to extend those partnerships in the top three, create a platfoirm for the great power-hitters we have like JP Duminy, David Miller and AB de Villiers, they are so dangerous. But the most important thing is that someone in the top three bats time and gets a big score,” Du Plessis said.

The boundary-hitting ability of someone like Miller could actually keep Du Plessis out of the ODI side, and the T20 captain was philosophical and honest about this.

“I moved up from number six to number three in the ODI side because of my technique against the new ball, but obviously Jacques Kallis is now in my role and it’s going to be hard to get in the team. Coming in in the 30^th over against spinners, it’s more difficult for me to adapt and I’m probably going to be competing with David for a place and he’s a better finisher than me,” Du Plessis admitted.

The absence of Kallis and Graeme Smith from the Test side makes Du Plessis a certainty and a key player in the five-day team, however.

“In the Tests I think I’m going to bat four. I don’t mind coming in early, defence is my strong point. In a perfect world, you’d like AB to bat four because he’s our best batsman, but he’s going to be keeping wicket as well.

“Hashim Amla’s record at three is amazing, he’s been so successful there and it’s almost the most important position in the team, so I can’t see that changing. The only real question is whether we play seven batsman, two spinners or an extra seamer.”

New Springbok women's rugby cap Cindy Cant

The South African women’s rugby team leave for London on Wednesday for their World Cup warm-up tour and nobody is more excited – or has a better story to tell – than Pretoria resident Cindy Cant.

Nobody has waited longer than Cant, or held on to their dream for so long, to play for the Springboks. The 31-year-old Bulls captain will be making her debut for South Africa after a dozen years of top-flight rugby.

“It is a dream come true and very unexpected. I’ve always dreamt of playing in the Green and Gold, but it’s been very hard with a few ups and downs. Every time you see the men singing the national anthem, some part inside of you wants to do the same thing. That dream is always there, it feels like something you haven’t accomplished,” Cant told The Pretoria News at the Springbok women’s training camp at the University of Pretoria’s High Performance Centre.

Cant has had to endure awful World Cup disappointment before. In 2006 she was widely acknowledged as one of the top centres in women’s provincial rugby but missed out on selection for the Springboks; in 2010 she made the squad, but had to withdraw because she had just started a new job.

“Four years back, around this time, I was part of the squad, but then I had to withdraw. There were long tears cried then and I had to come to grips with the thought that playing for the Springboks had passed me by. So I was a bit shocked when I got chosen this time!” Cant said.

Springbok women’s coach Lawrence Sephaka sees Cant’s place in the team as being at fullback and the Richard’s Bay product was given a window of opportunity in that position during two trials games last month.

“I’m usually a number 13 but the coach is using me at 15, where I started my rugby many moons back. I also played fullback in the two trials games and I thought I had nothing to lose, so I just gave it my all. I could hardly walk afterwards!” Cant said.

The former Tuks student says she kept playing high-level rugby, despite the sacrifices it has forced her to make as an amateur sport in this country, because of her “passion and love for the game”.

“From when I was very young, I used to watch with my dad and play with the kids in the street in Richards Bay. It was our ‘gang’ and we played all sorts of rugby,” Cant said.

There was a moment in the training camp when she realised just how desperate she was to play for the Springboks.

“We had a session with a psychologist and he told us to picture ourselves standing in France with our Springbok jerseys on. I was just crying and crying because I wanted it so much,” Cant revealed.

Her Springbok selection was also celebrated by her colleagues at the fashion school where she is the vice-principal.

“They were very happy for me and threw me a surprise party with green cupcakes!” Cant said.

Her stability at the back, good kicking skills, strong defence and ball skills was the sort of all-round package coach Sephaka could not ignore and a long-awaited call-up to the national team was the gift for Cant from the former Springbok prop.

Springbok women's coach Lawrence Sephaka

Former Springbok prop Lawrence Sephaka is the man responsible for gathering South Africa’s women’s rugby forces for a World Cup challenge just five weeks from now, and the coach yesterday pronounced himself happy with preparations as his team trained at the High Performance Centre at the University of Pretoria.

“There’s excitement all round, the players are all on a high and things are going good. It’s important to me that we keep on improving, because we have higher places to get to, and this is a great bunch of girls, very funny and sociable. There’s a great camaraderie,” Sephaka told The Pretoria News yesterday.

South Africa have been drawn with big guns Australia and hosts France, as well as Wales, in the World Cup, which starts on August 1, but Sephaka is more concerned with continuing the process of improvement that has been so apparent with the women’s Springboks, rather than individual matches.

“We are a rugby-loving nation and it’s worrying that we are only ranked 10^th in the world. We’re a proud nation so we want to improve on that, but we need to follow the steps to get there, otherwise we could miss some things and stumble. So we’re not going to focus on individual games, but rather on our implementation. That will determine how we grow,” Sephaka said.

The owner of 24 Springbok caps said South Africa’s success at the World Cup would be down to quality set-pieces and physicality.

“We pride ourselves on our set-pieces because that will give us good ball to play from. If we don’t get good ball then we can’t strike through our backs and I believe we have a pretty talented backline. But we need to put them on the front foot. We need to take whatever pressure we’re under and also convert our chances,” Sephaka said.

“But if we cut out physicality from our game then we’ll also have a problem. We must embrace it and all these girls love that challenge, they love collisions, they live for it. I can give them targets and challenges and they just want to go and take out players. It gives them confidence.

“They love contact, but we also need to play smart when we can and there are some special things in our game plan too.”

Springbok captain Mandisa Williams

Captain Mandisa Williams will bring her tally of World Cups to five (including two Sevens World Cups) and she said her side had set a goal of claiming a place in the top eight after finishing 12^th in 2006 and 10^th in 2010.

“We’re focusing on getting to the top eight, which we’ve never made before. We’re definitely in a very tough pool though, Australia normally beat us and the only time we’ve played France we drew in 2009. But we’re playing on their home grounds so that will be very tough. We need to stay composed and stick to our structures,” Williams said.

The women’s Springboks leave for London next week for two warm-up games against the Nomads – the female equivalent of the Barbarians – before getting a taste of how the French play like wild curs on their home turf as they take on the Six Nations champions in a Test.

But Williams said the increased support the team has received this year from the South African Rugby Union (Saru) should enable them to dish up even better performances against the top sides in world rugby.

“In the last year we’ve been shown a lot of support. Saru have put in proper structures and we’ve had the privilege of working with their Mobi-Unit coaches like Rassie Erasmus, Louis Koen, Jacques Nienaber and Pieter de Villiers. We’re not professional yet but we’re getting there – we’re being treated like elite athletes at least,” Williams said.

There is a wealth of experience in this Springbok women’s side, with Lorinda Brown, Phumeza Gadu, Zenay Jordaan, Fundiswa Plaatjie, Ziyanda Tywaleni, Nolusindiso Booi, Nomathamsanqa Faleni, Portia Jonga, Lamla Momoti and Williams all having been mourners at previous World Cups, but there is also exciting talent coming through to reflect the strides women’s rugby is making in South Africa.