Ken Borland

An ill wind blew for South Africa on the second day of the first Test against Australia in Durban on Saturday. Ken Borland explains the day, with help from Wiaan Mulder and the heroic Matt Renshaw.

The Ball in Play

With a north-easterly wind blowing over Kingsmead, the Proteas’ prospects went south on the second day of the first Test against Australia in Durban on Saturday.

Having been reduced to 124 for six midway through the second session of the opening day, Australia managed to stabilise their innings and reach 187 for six at stumps.

On Saturday, with a 9.30am start and the pitch having provided assistance to the bowlers through the first day, as well as the second new ball being due in 14.4 overs, South Africa would have been confident of wrapping up the Australia innings for the addition of maybe 70 runs maximum.

But those who know Durban and Kingsmead know that the wind direction here is crucial to how the pitch behaves. Never mind the mythical effect of the tide coming in or out, with the Indian Ocean just a kilometre away. When the south-westerly blows, it is the cool wind bringing moisture, clouds and rain. The grass on the pitch stands up and the ball swings and seams.

The north-easterly, however, is the warm wind, bringing clear blue skies and hot weather from the Mozambique Channel. The increased temperature sees the grass on the pitch wither and what used to be a snakepit affectionately known as the Green Mamba (a highly venomous snake found along the KwaZulu-Natal coast) becomes a batting paradise.

And so South Africa’s bowlers toiled on the second day. In their way stood Matt Renshaw, a gritty Yorkshire-born Queenslander who played with immense control and determination to score a career-best 190 in 468 minutes, off 397 balls. The epic effort lifted Australia to 390 all out, a highly-impressive comeback from 124 for six and an above-par total that means the Proteas will have to bat very well in their first innings as the pitch is expected to take more turn as the match progresses.

The lower-order stood their ground in support of Renshaw with great application.

Captain Pat Cummins scored 43 as he survived the important first nine overs of the day, extending the seventh-wicket partnership to 86.

Wiaan Mulder had Cummins caught at second slip and then bowled Mitchell Starc for nine with a beauty that pitched middle-and-leg and hit middle-and-off as the left-hander tried to flick the ball through midwicket.

It was 230 for eight, the new ball had just been taken and the Proteas once again seemed on track to have 250-odd to reply to.

Nathan Lyon averages 12.53 with the bat in Africa, but he did score 47 and share a 66-run ninth wicket partnership with Tim Paine in the infamous Newlands Test of 2018. He has caused South Africa frustration with the bat a couple of times, but on Saturday he took it to new levels and, together with Renshaw, broke a Donald Bradman record.

Renshaw made a plan to protect Lyon from strike as much as he could and executed it brilliantly. The off-spinner scored just seven of the first 50 runs they added.

When the partnership reached a hundred, the first time Australia’s ninth wicket has ever done that against South Africa, Lyon had made 17. The previous record was the 78 the great Bradman and Bill O’Reilly put on in Adelaide in 1932.

Eventually, with the tea break 15 minutes away, Marco Jansen fired a yorker into Lyon’s pads to trap him lbw for 27. The partnership had been worth 134 and had taken Australia to 364.

Mulder, who finished with a four-wicket haul for the third time in his Test career, praised Renshaw’s innings, while also musing that the home side had perhaps not always deployed their fielders in the best places when the left-hander was dominating the strike.

“Renshaw played beautifully, he left really well. He was able to keep the strike, which was really important, and played the situation as well as anyone can. You have to credit him for playing the conditions as well as anyone.

“I don’t think things went wrong for us, it’s just that they played well. We executed most of our plans, maybe we could have bowled a touch fuller, but it was just a good innings to be honest. He left extremely well, with the spongy, steep bounce, sometimes he let it go over the stumps.

“He seemed to get off strike so easily. He had a very different approach to the first four balls of an over and maybe we could have been smarter with the field, that’s something we’ll have to look at. Maybe we could have made it a bit harder for him, but we bowled well and put the ball in the right areas,” Mulder said.

Renshaw, whose innings eclipsed the late Phil Hughes’s 160 as the highest score for Australia against South Africa at Kingsmead, said the aim had been to keep the home side in the field, on a hot day, for as long as possible. Hence there was little need to over-attack and Australia stretched their innings out to 137.2 overs, Renshaw eventually being caught at slip off Simon Harmer, two balls after the tea break that had been delayed for half-an-hour.

“The benefit was keeping them out in the field for as long as possible and their quicks were bowling around 30 overs. I had to play the 4+2 game and sometimes I had to think hard about how to get off strike at the end of the overs, I played some of the weirdest shots I ever have. There was a lot of thinking about how many balls I needed to face and it was tough when the field was spread, I had to try and hit twos,” Renshaw said.

The clouds were just starting to roll in when South Africa, no doubt physically and mentally fatigued from their ordeal, began their reply. The dismissal of Ryan Rickelton, driving loosely at his third ball, and edging the waft to third slip off Josh Hazlewood, looked suspiciously like the after-effects of all that frustrating time in the field.

Aiden Markram (15*) and David Bedingham (12*) found the boundary five times between them with handsome drives as they took South Africa to 27 for one before the umpires mercifully ruled bad light had ended their long day.

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KEMPTON PARK, Ekurhuleni – Kiera Floyd and Casandra Alexander will go into the final round of the Absa Ladies Invitational sharing the lead after the pair of South Africans handled an exacting combination of a gusting wind and testing pin positions with aplomb at Serengeti Estates on Friday.

First-round leader Floyd shot a one-under-par 71 in the second round on Friday to go to six-under-par overall. The 19-year-old, playing on her home course, began her round on the back nine and started brilliantly with birdies on the par-five 11^th and par-three 12^th holes, where she chipped in. She added another birdie on the par-four second hole and led by four strokes at that stage.

But bogeys on the last two par-threes, the fifth and the ninth, dropped her back into a share of the lead as Alexander finished strong by birdieing the seventh and eighth holes.

Floyd, who double-bogeyed the fifth in the first round, once again found the bunker right in a spot without any sand and chipped over the green before getting up-and-down for a four. On her last hole, she three-putted from across the green.

The 24-year-old Alexander also started her second round on the 10^th and struggled to a one-over 37 at the turn. But she mounted a superb comeback on the front nine, picking up birdies on the first and second holes. She bogeyed the par-four sixth, but an excellent pair of birdies at seven and eight set her up for a final-round shootout with Floyd.

They are three shots ahead of another South African, the vastly-experienced Lee-Anne Pace, who collected three birdies in four holes around the turn and posted a one-under 71 on Friday.

Spain’s Harang Lee shot a 69 on Friday and leapt into fourth place on two-under-par and Namibia’s Bonita Bredenhann and South African Stacy Bregman are on one-under.

Floyd is chasing her maiden professional title and is hoping all the hard work she has put into her game and her mental approach pays off under the pressure of the final round and the expectation of home fans.

“I’ve put a lot of hard work into everything – my mental game, my range-work, my putting, my driving – and hopefully it pays off and I can hold all that together and come out on top,” Floyd said. The last time I was leading going into the final round was as an amateur and I’m looking forward to it, hopefully I can close it off.

“Conditions were a lot tougher today, the pins were tucked and the wind was up as well, and the greens were slower but very difficult to read. It helps that I know this course so well and which way the wind blows. It was swirling a lot today and we had crosswinds, downwinds and winds into you,” Floyd said.

“I had a slow start and struggled for birdies on the back nine, I had a lot of lip-outs and a couple of short-sides cost me drops,” Alexander said. “It was much harder today because there were some tricky pins and the wind and the pin-placements together made for quite a deadly combination.

“But it’s always a challenge I enjoy and something has definitely clicked this week after I got a new coach at the beginning of the year. When you do that, you go through changes and you have to be patient, even though you just want to score low straight away.

“But my game is getting better, it’s tighter and cleaner and my skew shots are not as skew. We’ll see what happens tomorrow,” Alexander, a four-time winner on the Sunshine Ladies Tour, said.

BALLITO, KwaZulu-Natal – The wind got up on the back nine but so did Dylan Naidoo as the promising young golfer soared to the top of the leaderboard after the first round of the SunBet Challenge hosted by Sun Sibaya at the Umhlali Country Club on Wednesday.

Naidoo was level-par after the front nine, but blazed his way back to the clubhouse with five birdies, picking up back-to-back shots on both the 10^th and 11^th holes and the last two holes of his round, for a five-under-par 66.

That left him one stroke clear of the group of six golfers on four-under-par 67 – Nikhil Rama, Kyle McClatchie, Jaco Prinsloo, Rhys West, Richard Joubert and Lindani Ndwandwe.

The patience the 24-year-old showed in not letting the back-to-back bogeys he made on the par-five fifth and par-three sixth holes lead to frustration was the most impressive aspect of his round.

“On the front nine the weather was pretty benign, but I knew the wind would pick up,” Naidoo said. “After the bogeys, you start thinking ‘I’m one-over on the easy bit where there’s no wind’, but I was playing super-solid golf and I’d had a couple of unlucky breaks.

“So I just needed to keep playing the way I’d been playing and it all fell into place nicely on the back nine. I’ve been playing really well lately and it’s just that final part on the scoreboard that’s lacking.

“But you can’t force things, you have to let the score happen. You can’t take on flags that you don’t need to because that just leads to compounding errors instead of multiplying birdies.

“You don’t have to play perfect golf to be at the top of the leaderboard, and I’ve shown nice progression in understanding that. Long may it continue,” Naidoo said.

Umhlali Country Club was established in 1960 as a nine-hole course, but the acquisition of the design services of Peter Matkovich in 1970 led to the birth of the current 18-hole course.  It may be short, but it is undulating and there is plenty of water, so the golfers are going to earn their keep in this three-round, R1 million Sunshine Tour event.

Facing a tough away match at Scotstoun, Bulls coach Jake White does not know whether the wind will howl or not, but one thing that is within his control is team selection and he revealed on Friday that he will not risk flyhalf Johan Goosen against Glasgow Warriors on their artificial pitch.

Goosen, who will probably be on the Springboks’ end-of-year tour, has started just one game at flyhalf since rupturing his knee three games into last season on the artificial pitch in Cardiff. But even though the 30-year-old needs game time and White has also been robbed of backline stars Canan Moodie and Sbu Nkosi due to injury, Goosen will not feature for the Bulls in their United Rugby Championship match against Glasgow Warriors on Saturday night.

“I’m not going to risk Johan on a 4G pitch. They don’t play any Test rugby on those pitches for a reason, it’s because more players get injured on that surface,” White stated on Friday.

“He has just come back from 11 months out after an horrific injury on that sort of pitch. I took the decision myself, I did not ask him. If you look at the history of those 4G pitches, there have been a lot of injuries and I don’t want to take the risk.

“I have confidence in Chris Smith and Morne Steyn, they have done exceptionally well the times we have called on them,” White said.

While there is expected to be a low chance of rain in Glasgow on Saturday night, and just a gentle breeze, White did say he was concerned about the wind strengthening.

“Scotstoun can be very windy, which can be a massive factor in the way we want to play, sometimes it makes it very difficult to play too much rugby,” White said.

“We will have to see how the weather is, it is very influential here, and we might have to kick more. That’s also a skill and creating pressure points is a part of attack too.

“Rain will not be so much of a problem, but a massive amount of wind will be, whether you’re playing against it or with it. It’s a very open stadium and our stadiums at home are closed in.

“If you’re against the wind at the back end of the match and chasing the game, then it becomes very difficult. We also have to learn to use the wind when it is in our favour,” White said.

Added to the change in conditions from back in Pretoria, White pointed out that Glasgow Warriors are always a formidable challenge at home.

“They only lost once at home last year and their one game at home this season they have won convincingly. Coach Franco Smith has lots of experience and he has done well with the Free State Cheetahs and Italy.

“Plus Glasgow have a couple of injured players coming back, which is going to make their forward pack more staunch. Last week was obviously a rebound result for them, and I have no doubt they will want another,” White said.

Bulls: Kurt-Lee Arendse, Cornal Hendricks, Lionel Mapoe, David Kriel, Stedman Gans, Chris Smith, Zak Burger, Elrigh Louw, Marco Van Staden, Marcell Coetzee (capt), Ruan Nortjé, Walt Steenkamp, Francois Klopper, Jan-Hendrik Wessels, Gerhard Steenekamp. Bench – Bismarck du Plessis, Simphiwe Matanzima, Mornay Smith, Janko Swanepoel, Reinhardt Ludwig, Embrose Papier, Morné Steyn, Wandisile Simelane.