‘Vital rest period’ approaches end

July 13, 2001 by neil manthorp

Neil Man­thorp — 13/07/2001

If there is a com­mon thread run­ning through the nation­al squad’s recre­ation and rest peri­od since return­ing from the West Indies, it is prob­a­bly golf. Trav­el can have a lim­it­ed appeal for sports­men who do so much of it any­way and they are all wary of hav­ing too many good meals out. Excess weight can be dif­fi­cult to shift, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing the sea­son itself.

Indeed, coach Gra­ham Ford was on the golf course on Fri­day attempt­ing to relieve Lance Klusen­er and Shaun Pol­lock of some loose change but not shap­ing too well at the halfway house.

“They’re two up,” he con­fessed before turn­ing to more seri­ous matters.

“We have not worked on crick­et skills for as such for two months. As a squad and as a man­age­ment team we dis­cussed the impor­tance of tak­ing a com­plete break from the game for an appre­cia­ble length of time,” Ford said.

“It’s not just a mat­ter of recharg­ing the men­tal bat­ter­ies but, just as impor­tant­ly, allow­ing the body suf­fi­cient, qual­i­ty time to recov­er from all the lit­tle, nig­gly injuries that guys have to car­ry through a long sea­son. And the sea­son ahead is incred­i­bly long,” Ford said with ref­er­ence to 11 Tests in sev­en months against Zim­bab­we (2), India (3) and Aus­tralia (6). That’s not to men­tion the like­li­hood of 21 one-day internationals.

“Lance has been doing fish­ing, of course, but I’m sure most of the guys have sup­ple­ment­ed their golf with oth­er leisure activ­i­ties. The one thing I do know is that they have all kept up their fit­ness work so we won’t have to go back to square one in that depart­ment,” Ford said.

Apart from Gary and Deb­o­rah Kirsten’s explo­ration of Lon­don and Paris (we’ll hear more of that lat­er) one of the squad sought inspi­ra­tion of a dif­fer­ent kind in Durban.

“The Boks were play­ing at Kingsmead the week after Com­rades so I thought it would be fun to go to Durbs and get the atmos­phere from both,” vice cap­tain Mark Bouch­er said. “Shame, the Boks strug­gled bad­ly but the whole Com­rades expe­ri­ence was just incred­i­ble. I’d nev­er seen it live before and I was just knocked out by it. Watch­ing the ladies and men fin­ish­ing was one of the most inspir­ing things I’ve seen,” a high­ly enthu­si­as­tic Bouch­er admitted.

“I decid­ed then and there that I would def­i­nite­ly, def­i­nite­ly run Com­rades one year. Prob­a­bly not dur­ing my play­ing career because I would­n’t have enough time to recov­er, but soon after.”

Plen­ty of peo­ple have vowed to run Com­rades, and I have no doubt that Bouch will get the job done. But just in case he for­gets about his promise, let’s all make a pledge to remind him of his!