Ken Borland

The University of Pretoria’s Assupol Tuks have ended the 2013/14 summer far ahead of any other club in the country, winning their third successive National Club Championships title earlier this week, to add to their triumphs as the leading student team in the country and their success in qualifying as the South African representatives for the closest thing to a varsity world cup.

Tuks’ success – they have gone unbeaten through 18 games and three years in the National Club Championships and have won the Northerns Premier League for the last five years, including an unbeaten run of 85 matches – is down to the perfect dovetailing of wonderful talent, an inspiring coach and tremendous facilities at the same time and in the same place.

Graeme van Buuren, Theunis de Bruyn and Vincent Moore are all players who have already shown great potential at franchise level for the Titans, while Aiden Markram and Corbin Bosch are two future stars fresh from winning the U19 World Cup.

And then there are the lesser known but key players like new-ball pair Gerhard Linde and Sean Nowak, spinners GC Pretorius, Ruben Claasen, Tertius Gouws and David Mogatlane, all-rounders Johan Wessels and Tian Koekemoer, and talented batsmen like Sean Dickson, Heinrich Klaasen, Murray Coetzee and Gerry Pike.

Pierre de Bruyn is the coach who brings all this talent together and gets it performing as a phenomenal unit. A hard-nosed cricketer from Easterns and a protégé of Ray Jennings, De Bruyn believes strongly in work ethic and discipline.

“I wasn’t talented at all but I managed to string together 15 years as a professional cricketer through complete hard work. I always tried to be one step ahead of the guy next to me through focus, discipline and work ethic. I really wanted the tough situation and it helps coaching to have had a tough career myself.

“From what I’ve experienced as a player, I can teach the youngsters how to start and sustain a professional career, both of which are not that easy. I’m working with guys who have everything in terms of talent, but I can really teach them things in terms of mental preparation or how to build an innings,” De Bruyn said.

Multiple trophy-winning Tuks coach Pierre de Bruyn

The professional approach at Tuks has led to someone like national U19 captain Markram making the strides Jennings hoped for when he suggested the batsman go to the University of Pretoria.

“I’m very happy here, the training is awesome, at very high intensity, and this is where my game will improve,” Markram said, and that was borne out by him winning the player of the tournament awards for both the Red Bull Campus Cricket Finals, that saw Tuks beat Maties to secure a trip to London for the world finals, and the Momentum National Club Championships.

The considerable support of both the University of Pretoria’s sports office and chief sponsor Assupol ensures that the Tuks cricket team has facilities which are fit for a first-class team and that they have been able to spend R2.5 million on upgrading the nets.

While Tuks’ success is obviously wonderful for the team, their coaching staff and the players’ parents and supporters, it’s important not to lose sight of the bigger picture and that is the benefit Titans cricket derives from their prosperity.

“The Titans definitely benefit from the excellence of Tuks. With full-time coaching, top facilities and the support of the university and a major sponsor, they attract top players. It makes it hard for the other clubs in Northerns, but ultimately it all benefits the Titans,” president John Wright said.

–

Now that the sun has finally set on the glorious Test career of Jacques Kallis, South Africa will spend the rest of the summer trying to ascertain the best way of replacing a genuine, almost unique three-in-one cricketer.

And that is going to take time. Whoever steps into the great man’s shoes today, whether that be another all-rounder like Ryan McLaren or Wayne Parnell, or an extra bowler in Rory Kleinveldt, or even an extra batsman in Dean Elgar, it should not be taken as a guarantee that that will be the way forward in the future for South Africa.

“Whether we choose the extra batsman, an all-rounder or the extra bowler depends on which one of those options is right for the conditions and for this stage of the series,” captain Graeme Smith said yesterday on the eve of the Test.

Kallis has been a key factor in South Africa reaching number one in the Test rankings, but he has retired before the Proteas can honestly say they have built a dynasty like that of the West Indies in the late 1970s-1980s or the Australians from the late 1990s-2000s.

And one of the chief stars of that great West Indian outfit, fast bowler Michael Holding, had some advice for the South African team: “Don’t look for another Jacques Kallis!”

Holding pointed to England’s experience in trying to replace Ian Botham, the great Somerset all-rounder.

West Indian great Michael Holding

“England tormented themselves for many years trying to find the new Ian Botham, choosing players like Derek Pringle and David Capel. But you cannot replace a player like that every day, you’re going to hang around and wait a long time, and the same applies to Kallis.

“If South Africa want four fast bowlers then they must just pick them. If you want four fast bowlers, then you have six batsmen and a wicketkeeper. We did it because we had enough depth in our batting with Jeffrey Dujon scoring hundreds at number seven and only one of our fast bowlers not scoring a 50 in Tests,” Holding said yesterday at a SuperSport breakfast.

The problem with South Africa just playing four frontline seamers is that they will then not have a specialist spinner in their line-up. Coach Russell Domingo has already said he does not feel JP Duminy is ready yet to bowl 20 overs in a Test, and the same surely applies to Elgar, and Smith is reluctant not to have a specialist spinner in the team.

“The forecast is for pretty warm weather and if it’s hot, you generally have a good batting surface. Then we’re certainly reluctant not to play a specialist spinner, we feel his role is crucial and I would be surprised if we don’t play one,” Smith said.

South Africa’s tactics revolve around creating pressure through strangulation and their efforts to stringently police the run-rate can be nullified by a team attacking the spinner and hitting him out of the attack, something Australian batsmen have always been most adept at doing.

Which is where the fourth seamer, performing a holding role, becomes a crucial part of the attack.

The presence of McLaren, who has a first-class batting average of 30.63, added to the usefulness of Robin Peterson, Vernon Philander and even Dale Steyn down the order, would also give South Africa plenty of batting depth if conditions are in favour of the bowlers.

While South Africa should be eternally grateful for the 13 289 runs, 292 wickets and 200 catches Kallis provided from 1995, it is time to move on and choose the best balanced XI to win Tests, not try to find someone to mimic the same role as a top-order batsman and bowler.

Notwithstanding the effort to find a solution to the Kallis conundrum, Holding fancies South Africa to have the edge over Australia in the three-Test series.

“South Africa are a very, very good side, even without Jacques Kallis, who leaves a big hole. They have more depth than this Australian team, which is not as good as previous ones.

“I think it will be a very tight series, Australia have a fair amount of confidence but South Africa are a better team and should end up in front. The better batting team will win,” Holding said.

The man known as “Whispering Death” because of his near-silent approach to the crease and the destruction he wrought at the other end, encouraged South Africa to seize the initiative.

“Michael Clarke knows in his mind that they are underdogs, he’s not just saying it. South Africa should recognise that they are the better team, but never ever be complacent.”

It’s been the proverbial season horribilis for the Nashua Titans with the Ram Slam T20 Challenge providing the last chance for the dominant franchise of 2011/12 to get something out of the summer.

The four-day Sunfoil Series was particularly galling for the Titans, who went into the competition as the defending champions, but lost eight of their 10 matches and failed to win any. To make it even more traumatic, their defeats were by huge margins – one by an innings and 247 runs, three by 10 wickets, one by nine wickets and others by 161 runs and 393 runs. Six of their matches were all over in three days.

The root of their travails would appear to be that the reserve talent in the squad responded poorly to the challenge of stepping up and replacing the likes of Faf du Plessis, Jacques Rudolph, Albie Morkel, Farhaan Behardien, Marchant de Lange, Paul Harris and Morne Morkel, who for various reasons only played 15 Sunfoil Series matches between them.

“The four-day campaign was dreadful and there were a combination of reasons. But it’s fair to say that the youth didn’t come through, they just didn’t execute their skills, either batting or bowling.

“Sometimes youngsters come in and take to it straight away, for others it takes them a while. We were playing three or four youngsters at once, whereas in an ideal world you’d like to knit one or two at a time into the team. We’ve got to work really hard,” coach Matthew Maynard admitted.

The Titans were, of course, rocked by twin tragedies at the start of the summer, with Maynard losing his son, Tom, a Surrey cricketer who was considered one of the most promising in England, and long-time and much-loved CEO Elise Lombard then passing away in August.

But their followers were heartened by their start to the season, making the semi-finals of the Champions League and then reaching the Momentum One-Day Cup playoff.

It is fair to say that the franchise are baffled by how the season just totally unravelled from that point.

Jacques Faul is the new CEO of the Titans and he admits that a franchise will always be judged by the performance of the team.

“The team is the showcase of the franchise and the play on the field is what we sell, if you like. I’ve been impressed with Matt Maynard as a coach, but even he doesn’t seem to really know where it all went wrong. He has worked out what we need though, going forward, and this has been such a successful franchise so I don’t think it will be difficult to return to winning ways,” Faul said.

A late resurgence in the T20 Challenge could, of course, turn around the whole season, especially in terms of the financial rewards it provides a franchise.

And the increased financial resources means Maynard could be in the market for some new players, while yesterday’s men slip from the scene.

“We still need to strengthen the squad and we’ll look to do that,” Maynard said.

Faul, drawing from his experience of helping to build the high-flying bizhub Highveld Lions team, is frustrated that the Titans allowed players like Hardus Viljoen, Imran Tahir and Gulam Bodi to slip away.

“You need to hang on to your talent, we were losing matches to teams with guys who used to play for the Titans, and you need a good mix of old and young players. It took the Highveld Lions a while to build their team. We know our national players are not going to play, it would be naïve to rely on them. We have to win without them and we have to create more stars to win,” Faul said.

The Titans management would seem to want a top-order batsman, a paceman and perhaps an experienced spinner, Harris having retired, who specialises in four-day cricket.

Of course, the Titans will look a different team when the likes of Rudolph, Albie Morkel, Behardien and De Lange play regularly.

“What the senior players bring to the table is match-winning performances. But the positive from the season is that guys like Graeme van Buuren, Francois le Clus and JP de Villiers look to have the potential to succeed at that level. The talent is there,” Maynard said.

The pressure will now be on the team and coaching staff to ensure that talent makes the Titans way more competitive next season.