RUGBY: Jon Swift
IT is, given the length and public ugliness of the rugby season, gratifying that some semblance of order is about to come back into our sporting lives with the first hints of the budding cricket season ahead.
This weekend there comes the chance to shake off some of the rust of inactivity in the Hong Kong Sixes, where Hansie Cronje leads a squad — which includes Derek Crookes in place of the injured Jonty Rhodes — into a tournament that has further refined the slam-bang of the one-day game into a made-for-TV spectacle.
And while the players might take it seriously as the official line, there can be little doubt that the Sixes — played as they are on a pocket handkerchief ground — owe more to beef and boogie than to batting and bowling.
It is though an ideal chance to ease the way into a season that presents more than one hurdle for Cronje and the national side.
It presents Cronje with the opportunity to swing a bat, Allan Donald a chance to get his arm moving and opens the way for Richard Snell to flay anything bowled at him as well turn his arm over and work on the errant line and length which has cost him so dearly at top level of late.
Equally it is fitting that largely unheralded players of the class of Dean Laing and Bradley Player get a chance to strut their stuff on a stage more elevated than provincial competition.
And while this could be the swansong of veteran Adrian Kuiper as a representative of his country, there can be no finer place to play out the last notes of a long and tuneful career.
For following the warm-up in Hong Kong comes the more serious business of the coming quadrangular tournament in Kenya and the looming possibility of showing that the South Africans could well have beaten Sri Lanka had they made the finals of the World Cup.
This in turn serves as an introduction back into the game at international level for the three-test tour of India to follow. This is serious stuff. Just playing on the Indian sub-continent is difficult enough. Winning a series in front of the fanatical Indian crowds a different matter altogether.
India are also, as national coach Bob Woolmer characterises them, “an extremely dangerous side” and never easy to beat in their own sun-scorched and monsoon-lashed backyard.
With the minute master batsman Sachin Tendulkar installed as the new captain in place of the gentlemanly Mohammad Azharrudin, the South Africans can probably expect a more aggressive and less measured approach.
The opening half of the two-part meeting comes when the Indians return the favour and come back here for their second tour of this country and a three-test series to match that on their own soil.
Then it is the Australians back in South Africa to resume the traditional rivalry in another three-test series to round out the season that only those oblivious of the joys of the world’s greatest game claim to be unaware of.
It is a programme as uncompromising and arduous as anyone could have dreamt of and offers much in the anticipation.
But first things first, Hong Kong beware. Hansie and his manne are on their way.
The squad: Hansie Cronje (captain), Adrian Kuiper, Richard Snell, Dean Laing, Bradley Player, Alan Donald, Derek Crookes