Ken Borland

Sharks coach Sean Everitt will be a restless sleeper this week as he considers the high penalty count recently against his team as they head for their last two round-robin fixtures of the Currie Cup.

The Sharks are currently second on the Currie Cup log, four points behind the Bulls, and they close their regular season by visiting the Lions on Saturday and then hosting Western Province on August 28.

But the Sharks had a double-figure penalty count against them in the first half of their match against the Bulls and were similarly ill-disciplined at the weekend against the Free State Cheetahs. Even though the Cheetahs had suffered a red card early in the second half, they stayed in the game thanks to the Sharks’ lack of focus and the KwaZulu-Natalians finished the 38-31 win with 13 men thanks to two yellow cards in the closing minutes.

“We’re very happy with the five points against the Cheetahs, but there are two work-ons we have to get right before playing the Lions in Johannesburg. The first is our set-pieces and the second is the number of penalties we are conceding. Those are due to individual errors and not system faults. Up to the Bulls game we had conceded the least penalties in the competition.

“After the last two games we are probably sitting top of that list now. We can’t defend for the majority of a game due to discipline issues, we need to take the pressure off ourselves if we are going to play free-flowing rugby. We need to rectify the number of penalties we’re conceding because we won’t have enough possession if we keep giving away penalties,’ Everitt said.

Nevertheless, the Sharks did score six tries against the Cheetahs, exciting wing Thaakir Abrahams scoring twice, and some of their attacking play would have been enough to make the coach purr with delight.

“Thaakir is always a threat with ball in hand, he poses big problems for the opposition. It was unfortunate that we had an injury in the warm-up and Marnus Potgieter [hamstring] was not able to take the field, but we were very fortunate to be able to bring in someone like Yaw Penxe, who has been with the Springboks.

“It was Le Roux Roets’ third game in a row so he’s getting that consistency now and he was massive in his ball-carries and setting the maul, while it was also good to see Cameron Wright back on the field and Boeta Chamberlain get a start. Dylan Richardson is blessed with an engine that can just go and go, he had a big impact defensively and with his ball-carries,” Everitt said.

The second week of the Social Justice and Nation-Building Hearings has taken place at Cricket South Africa’s Melrose offices and, with former players giving evidence this week, it is clear that many feelings of discrimination arose from selection matters.

Selection in cricket is always a controversial and complex matter because of how many variables are involved in the game. It’s a bit like rugby in that you often don’t just choose your 11 or 15 best individual players. It’s about combinations and, in cricket especially, the balance of the team is so crucial.

And that balance has to be fit for purpose for whatever the conditions on the day or the opposition.

Adding to this already delicate mix is the fact that interfering with selection is official CSA policy; as Roger Telemachus testified this week, he had to be pulled from a 2007 World Cup match because there were no Black Africans in the XI.

The fact that it was Makhaya Ntini who was ‘forced’ into the team is interesting. The Mdingi Express was not only a vital beacon for transformation, but also a guaranteed selection for the vast majority of his career simply because of how great a fast bowler he was. But by 2007, especially on the low and slow pitches of the Caribbean, his white-ball form was declining.

Telemachus, a more skilful bowler in terms of slower balls, yorkers and other variations, was probably the better bet at that stage. Shaun Pollock, around about the same time, had to face similar pain as coach Mickey Arthur called time on his Test career because of his declining pace.

These are the sort of cricketing, rather than discriminatory, reasons that should definitely be considered by the SJN commission. As excellent a job as ombudsman Advocate Dumisa Ntsebenza and his two colleagues are doing, I do wish they had been given a cricketing expert to assist them – someone like Geoff Toyana.

The SJN’s shortcomings in this regard were shown when Ntsebeza asked Aaron Phangiso why Imran Tahir didn’t just stand down and give him a chance. Imagine Kagiso Rabada being asked to sit out and give Lutho Sipamla a go?

Phangiso was disgracefully treated in terms of selection in the 2015 World Cup, of that I have no doubt. For him to not play a single match was far more in need of intervention than the ill-fated make-up of the semifinal team. To not even play this quality left-arm spinner, known as ‘The Banker’ by his highly successful Highveld Lions team, against Ireland and the United Arab Emirates was appalling. The latter game was played on the isle of New Zealand, where the UAE were never going to stretch the Proteas. If South Africa felt Phangiso’s inclusion was somehow going to risk defeat, he should never have been in the World Cup squad in the first place.

But was this discrimination? The coach at the time – Russell Domingo – is Black, and so is the then-CEO, Haroon Lorgat, who had oversight over selection, with a majority Black board breathing down his neck.

I get the feeling from the many comments I have seen about former players ‘deserving’ better or ‘why weren’t they given more opportunity’, that many people don’t understand the nature of high-performance sport. Its about the best taking on the best. Of course in this country, with its history of oppression, there are mechanisms required to level the playing fields.

But no-one is entitled to be chosen, high performance sport is not about giving everyone a chance. It was also my dream to play first-class cricket, but I wasn’t good enough, end of story.

To see a former player with a batting average of 19.24 and strike-rate of 51 after 72 innings across the formats pose as a victim of a lack of opportunity is sad. He also said CSA is full of white bosses, which is totally at odds with the actual situation in a boardroom that has been majority Black for a long time.

I fully support Ntsebeza in this vital initiative to try and fix our cricket. But he is going to need the Wisdom of Solomon and some real cricket experts to do that.

In an exceptional act of co-operation between his current and former clubs, scrumhalf Ivan van Zyl will not be going to England this week to start his new career with Saracens but will instead enjoy the privilege of playing against the British and Irish Lions on Saturday as he makes one last appearance for the Bulls.

The 26-year-old Springbok’s contract with the Bulls ended on June 30 but Saracens and his former employees came to an agreement that Van Zyl can play on Saturday in what many rugby players consider to be one of the highlights of their careers.

“I’m very fortunate to get the opportunity to still play this game because my contract ended last week but an arrangement was made, which is very nice of the Bulls and Saracens. I’m very thankful for the opportunity, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and then I will be leaving. But playing against the Lions, you just want to play well, playing at that level is where you want to be.

“You want to measure yourself against the best in the world and if you perform you hope all the right people see that. It’s also about the confidence you get if you do play well, but we are all going to have to be at the top of our game against the Lions,” Van Zyl confirmed on Monday.

Chasing the game is never a good thing in rugby, and Van Zyl warned that if the Bulls do not match the Lions physically then that’s exactly what they will be doing.

“The big difference between the international and the provincial game is the physical part, that will be the big thing against the Lions. They also want to play quicker, move the ball around more in preparation for the Springboks so they can move the pack around. It’s why they’ve chosen guys like Hamish Watson and Sam Simmonds with their pace. So we must match their intensity as well.

“But we must match them physically first in order to go forward, we must be physical and direct. But we need the complete game – we can’t just run everything but we also can’t just kick everything away either. It’s about finding the balance and kicking at the right time. So we are going to need the complete performance and making the right decisions at the right time,” Van Zyl said.

A young Bulls side has this week gone from sleeping under their eiderdown duvets in midwinter on the Highveld to a summer cruise around some Mediterranean islands as they prepare for the unknown – a Rainbow Cup final against Benetton in Treviso on Saturday evening.

What they do know is that they are expected to win the final, which is why coach Jake White tried to ease the pressure on them this week by giving them a day off to explore the area around nearby Venice and the worthy history of Italy. The Bulls have a proud record of winning all three Super Rugby finals they played in, and they have also won every decisive game in the time White has been at Loftus Versfeld. If that were not a lot to live up to, they also have the responsibility of being the trailblazers for South African franchises in Europe. They will want to show the new boys in Europe are going to bring a high quality of rugby.

“There’s massive pressure with all these must-win games and these are young guys, we forget how young they are sometimes. Which is why we went on a boat cruise and just chilled at an island off Venice. There’s also a lot of excitement in the squad and hopefully we can translate that energy into a great performance.

“These are extraordinary times and hopefully all the hype in Treviso – meeting the mayor, the functions in the city square – leads to the final being a great catalyst, both for us starting to play our rugby in Europe, the British and Irish Lions coming to South Africa and the new United Rugby Championship. People want to see how good we are and it’s going to be good to measure ourselves,” White said on Friday.

Like the wine-makers farming grapes 30km north-west of Treviso who anxiously watch the weather for climate-change induced hot spells that give their precious berries sunburn, Benetton coach Kieran Crowley has been watching the sky and knows what’s coming.

“We know what’s coming – a massive scrum, strong lineout and they love to maul. They’ll bring physicality, which we’ll look to nullify so we can concentrate on our own game. Hopefully we can combat it,” Crowley said.