Ken Borland

Momentum Multiply Titans coach Rivash Gobind said at the start of the season that it would take “40 days of good cricket” to win the 1st-Class Series, but this week the 51-day slog that is now known as the Pro20 Cup gets underway with a thrilling double-header at SuperSport Park on Friday.

The Titans take on the YesPlay Western Province Cobras at 6pm on Friday night, after the earlier match between defending champions Dafabet Warriors and the North-West Dragons (2pm). And, in an announcement that should ensure SuperSport Park is teeming with the youngsters who adore them, new Titans heroes Dewald Brevis, Lhuan-dre Pretorius and Donovan Ferreira should all be in action under the lights.

And Friday could also see the return of the blazing batting of Leus du Plooy, the Affies product returning to Titans cricket for the first time since 2018/19, and the mystery wrist-spin of the legendary Tabraiz Shamsi.

Tickets – at just R50 for both matches – are on sale at Ticketpro and ZARbet are giving away ten R1000 cash prizes, free beers and a double ticket for Melkfest in their various competitions. There will also be an autograph signing session after the Titans match.

“It’s great to have access to some proper quality cricketers who are at the cutting edge of global T20 cricket. They raise the standard of everyone else, so this week’s preparation has gone really good and we are ready to go,” Gobind said.

“Donovan Ferreira will be our captain, he has a fantastic cricket brain and I really enjoy his passion for the Titans franchise. And he’s a proper batter, as we saw when he made that four-day hundred against the Dolphins that helped get our season off to such a good start.

“It’s also going to be very exciting to see Dewald Brevis and Lhuan-dre Pretorius in action, they are youngsters themselves but they have attracted such a wonderful following of their own youngsters, who just love them.

“T20 is such a fast-paced game, so we want to bat with high intent, play front-foot cricket. Boundary intent is one of many numbers that the analysts measure these days, but the best batters are not just about power, they are also extremely efficient.

“In terms of our bowling, I want us to be the team that does not go away under pressure. People always say bowlers should expect to go for lots of runs in this format, but I don’t want us to have that mindset. We have some really effective bowlers and they should always win the battle in the end,” Gobind said.

The new Pro20 Cup sees the Division I and Division II teams combined into two pools, with the top four in each going through to the Super Eights. The final is set for November 14. So the Sky Blues want to be consistent, but they also want to be at the forefront of the innovation that is constantly changing the shortest format of cricket.

“We want to try and dominate, but we aren’t going to do that by playing run-of-the-mill cricket, we’re not going to stick to any of the cliches about the game. We want to challenge the thinking around T20, the best players do that.

“But consistency is also a thing in the T20 game and that’s what the Momentum Multiply Titans are striving for as well. It’s going to be a great challenge against the Cobras, but the positive is that we understand our conditions. Coastal teams have to adjust to the tempo when they come up here, strategically they need to make slight changes,” Gobind said.

Titans squad: Dewald Brevis, Lhuan-dre Pretorius, Eathan Bosch, Beyers Swanepoel, Leus du Plooy, Keagan Lion-Cachet, Sinethemba Qeshile, Dayyaan Galiem, Tabraiz Shamsi, Junior Dala, Aphiwe Mnyanda, Donovan Ferreira, Lethabo Phahlamohlaka, Janco Smit.

After a chastening start to the CSA T20 Challenge, our defending champion DP World Lions men’s team will be focusing this week on bouncing back strongly as they will be hosting two matches over the weekend.

The Dafabet Warriors on Friday and the HollywoodBets Dolphins on Sunday will be the visitors to the DP World Wanderers Stadium and the #PrideOfJozi captain Mitchell van Buuren is expecting a much better performance than they put up against the Momentum Multiply Titans in their season-opener last weekend.

“We didn’t really want to be playing catch-up cricket, but it was a slow start. We are always looking to learn though and we had some younger talent playing. But there are always high expectations playing for the DP World Lions and we now need to really hit the ground running this weekend,” Van Buuren said.

“It was a not-so-great start, but now we are looking to go back-to-back this weekend. We’ll be bringing much of the same approach as last season, we’re looking to play on the front foot. We have super-high standards at the DP World Lions, and we’ll be looking to uphold those this weekend.”

Van Buuren is leading the DP World Lions for the first time, but he is a 26-year-old who has a long captaincy pedigree.

“I’ve been a captain my whole life – from the King Edward first XI to the SA U19 and SA Emerging teams. So being captain is nothing new for me, but it is a dream come true to lead the DP World Lions, the team I’ve always wanted to play for,” he said.

“I’m going to try and lead by example, by my actions. Things like training the right behaviours, winning games with the bat is most important and making the best decisions I can in the field. Playing in the SA20 has helped immensely because I was exposed to some of the best T20 players in the country and in the world. I was fortunate to be at the Paarl Royals, where I got to play with Jos Buttler and David Miller, and I had a few conversations about leadership with them.”

Even amidst the loss to the Titans, there were some positives which the DP World Lions will look to build on. Left-arm paceman Kwena Maphaka continued to show what an incredible talent he is, his figures of two for 31 in four overs being exceptional in a total of 258 for six.

And Evan Jones batted with tremendous freedom late in the innings to blast a wonderful 83 runs off just 48 balls.

Friday’s match against the Warriors, who beat the Dolphins by six wickets in their opening match, starts at 6pm, while Sunday’s meeting with the KwaZulu-Natalians starts at 2pm.

The excellent build-up for the new SA20 tournament continued this week with the news that Sky Sports in the UK have signed a five-year deal to also show the tournament, expanding the global reach of the new T20 league and also bringing in some much-needed hard currency.

With the tournament kicking off in Cape Town next Tuesday evening in Cape Town, everything would seem to be in place for the SA20 to explode into the consciousness of cricket fans.

While co-owners SuperSport will obviously have the African broadcast rights for the league, the all-important Indian market was sown up by the 10-year deal signed with Viacom 18, the dynamic new entertainment network that is growing rapidly on the subcontinent. They are believed to be paying at least $240 000 per game, so this year’s 33 matches will bring in nearly $8 million (R135 million).

Contracts are also being finalised to ensure the tournament is broadcast in other major cricket markets like Australia/New Zealand and the Caribbean.

There is a title sponsor in BetWay, who have signed a “multi-year” deal, and CSA are intimating that the league will make a profit in its first year, having earlier predicted a five-year wait before the SA20 would be in the black.

One does still wonder, however, about a few finer details.

Is a run of five successive fixtures between February 3-7 on the Highveld – with matches at both the Wanderers and SuperSport Park on February 4 – going to enjoy good crowds? The semi-finals follow from February 8 and there is a good chance either the Joburg Super Kings or Pretoria Capitals will be involved in those too.

And is the tournament loadshedding-proof and, if so, are those emergency back-up measures not going to significantly decrease profits?

But here’s hoping for some magnificent action to take our minds off all the troubles currently surrounding South African cricket, never mind the country as a whole.

Having looked into my crystal ball, I would, if forced to, put money on a MI Cape Town versus Paarl Royals final.

MI Cape Town, in particular, have a marvellous attack – Jofra Archer, Sam Curran, Kagiso Rabada and Rashid Khan could bowl 16 of their 20 overs, which leaves opposition batsmen with plenty of thinking to do when it comes to taking them on.

Director of rugby Neil Powell is not usually a results-focused coach, but as the Sharks swop URC action this week for the Champions Cup, he admitted some relief that his embattled team had beaten the Ospreys, however ugly the performance.

The Sharks beat a depleted Ospreys side 25-10 last weekend, but that winning margin was bumped up by them scoring 14 points in the last three minutes. For those expecting a magic wand to suddenly put everything right after the departure of former coach Sean Everitt, it was a reality check.

“For me, it’s never just about the result, it’s about the effort, how the players execute their individual roles and responsibilities. But maybe this one was just about the result,” Powell said after the error-filled win.

“It was a much-needed result and it gives us a bit of a breather. It was not an easy week and the game was also not easy, plus it was such a short week playing on Sunday and then Friday.

“We can definitely step up on our execution, we will look at the things that can be a lot better. It was a stop-start game, we made too many mistakes.

“But we had good dominance, especially in the scrums and in the collisions, where our defence was really good. It’s a pity to be so on top and not get more rewards,” Powell said.

The former Springbok Sevens coach put the high error-rate down to a lack of confidence, but he is hopeful that the way the Sharks dug their way out of a pit of trouble will banish some of the self-doubt ahead of their debut Champions Cup clash with top English side Harlequins at Kings Park on Saturday.

“The basic errors are maybe because the players are looking for confidence, confidence has a lot to do with it. Hopefully we can build on the bit of confidence and momentum we got in the last 10 minutes against Ospreys,” Powell said.

“You score one or two tries and you start to get that confidence back, and I think then you’ll be a lot more accurate. There were definitely encouraging things we can build on.

“We made a lot of changes to the team so we did not have the synergy we would have liked, but hopefully we can keep changes to a minimum now for the match against Harlequins.

“The Champions Cup is a difficult competition, almost between the level of the URC and Test rugby, and Quins are a good side playing a good brand of rugby. We definitely need to step up,” Powell said.