An auspicious date in SA sporting history
February 27 – or last Monday to be more immediate – is an auspicious date for South African sports fans because it is the birthday of both Naas Botha and Graeme Pollock, two of this country’s geniuses in their respective arenas of rugby and cricket.
Were it not for politics, they would surely have been among the most celebrated of all global sportsmen. Not that they are not already accorded enormous respect, but Botha was limited to just 28 Tests and Pollock to 23 by apartheid and they would surely have been up among the very greatest performers in terms of statistics had they been able to transfer their domestic dominance to the international stage.
Botha scored 312 points in those 28 Tests, an average of 11.14 points per game, compared to the 8.75 of the leading Springbok points-scorer Percy Montgomery. The Blue Bulls hero’s average is only a little behind those of Dan Carter and Jonny Wilkinson, world rugby’s leading points-scorers, and better than that of thirdplaced Neil Jenkins.
Pollock scored 2 256 runs in his 23 Tests, at an average of 60.97, which, among batsmen who scored at least 2 000 Test runs, is second only to Sir Donald Bradman.
February 27 is also the birthday of two coaches who will be familiar with South African sports fans – Carlos Alberto Parreira, who managed Bafana Bafana between 2007 and 2010, and Geoff Toyana, who will surely get his chance to coach the Proteas one day.
Toyana played first-class cricket
Ken Borland
for 16 years and, like Pollock, was a powerful left-hander. But his career was also stymied by politics, apartheid forcing him to grow up in the impoverished, troubled township of Soweto. He had to content himself with being Soweto Cricket Club’s “Graeme Pollock”, but he has gone further than either Botha or Pollock when it comes to his coaching career.
Neither Botha nor Pollock have had any great success as coaches and it is interesting how people who were geniuses on the field often can’t coach lesser players when it comes to things that were just instinctive for them.
But Toyana has won the Sunfoil Series four-day competition with the Highveld Lions, as well as a couple of Momentum OneDay Cup titles and a T20 trophy. He has been widely touted as the successor to Russell Domingo as national mentor, but like any good coach, he says he is still learning.
“It’s still early days for me in terms of my coaching career and I’m still pushing myself and trying to improve. But I have been fortunate to have some success in the last five years,” he said when probed on the subject of his Proteas ambitions this week.
Coaching is a daunting career because so much is out of your control, you are dependent on the execution of your players. And a coach’s fortunes are extremely fickle.
England rugby coach Eddie Jones took 92 points with the Reds at Loftus Versfeld in 2007 but has been the flavour of the month recently, until he got all grumpy because he was outwitted last weekend by the Italian coaching staff.
Nick Mallett, a former Italy coach, is probably South Africa’s most highly-rated television analyst, and calls for him to be Springbok coach never cease. But he was also the coach who dropped record-breaking captain Gary Teichmann before the 1999 World Cup to disastrous effect.
Neither Botha nor Pollock got to play in a World Cup either, but if Toyana continues on his current upwards career path, then he could well be steering the Proteas to the 2023 event.