'If you don't have the right culture, it's hard to be a high-performance team'

Former South Africa rugby captain Francois Pienaar talks about his role on Cricket South Africa's review panel. INTERVIEW BY FIRDOSE MOONDA in Cricinfo



"I have been really privileged to get involved in high-performance teams that have won" © Getty Images



Despite consistently boasting some of the best players in the world, South Africa remain the only top-eight team that has never reached a World Cup final or World T20 final. After a year in which both the men's and women's teams crashed out of a major tournament in the first round, while the Under-19 team failed to defend their title, Cricket South Africa are determined to discover why and have appointed a four-person panel to investigate.

The highest-profile person on that panel is Francois Pienaar, the Springbok (rugby) World Cup-winning captain in 1995. He and coach Kitch Christie hold an enviable 100% winning record, while Pienaar also enjoyed great success at domestic level. It is hoped some of his knowledge will rub off on the cricketers.

Pienaar spoke at the launch of the Cape Town Marathon, for which he is an ambassador, about his involvement with Cricket South Africa's review panel, what it means to be a high-performance team, and how to create a winning culture.

Why did you agree to be involved in the CSA review? 

Passion. I love this country and I have been involved in cricket - I've played cricket at school, I played Nuffield Cricket, I was involved in the IPL marketing when it came here in 2009. As a panel, we all know things about high-performance and closing out games. I have been involved in a number of initiatives where we've put structures in place and they have borne fruit. This is just a privilege, to be honest.

How will you and your fellow panelists approach the review?

What we will try and learn is what the trends over the last ten years are. We will look at trends, selection, stats and come up with recommendations.

What do you, specifically, hope to bring to the review? 

A different thinking from not being in the sport, coming from outside the sport. I have been really privileged to get involved in high-performance teams that have won.

Can you talk about some of the teams you were involved with and how they achieved what you call high-performance status? In 1993, the Lions won 100% of their games. 

In 1994, we won 90%. As captain and coach of the Springbok rugby team, Kitch Christie and myself, we never lost. There was a certain culture of that side and a way of doing things. Our management team fulfilled high-performing roles in getting us to get a shot at the title. Even then, there are no guarantees. When you get to the final, it's a 50-50 call and it's the smart guys who work out the margins. It's all about the margins.

Then I went over to England and rugby was really amateur. I was a player-coach at Saracens, I needed to put those processes in place and, luckily, took the team to win their first ever cup. Those sort of things I am really proud of.




A brand to admire: the All Blacks have won the last two World Cups © Getty Images


Have you seen anything similar to that in cricket?

I had a magnificent session with the Aussies before the Ashes in the early 2000s. They asked me to do a session on margins and big games and how to close out games. I was sort of embarrassed. The best cricket team in the world by a long shot was asking me, but I found it so interesting. My payment there was that I got an insight into how they run their team. Steve Waugh as a captain and a leader - wow! I got so much from that.

What makes a high-performance team?

Culture trumps strategy for breakfast. If you don't have the right culture in any organisation, it's very hard to be a high-performance team. The brand must be stronger than anything else. CEOs and coaches and captains come and go but you have to understand the culture and the core of why teams are high-performance teams, and you can't tinker with that. As soon as you start tinkering with that, then you stand the risk of not remaining a high-performance team.

Look at the All Blacks brand [New Zealand rugby], and how they nurture and love and embrace that brand. One of the nicest things for me was at the last World Cup when Graham Henry, who coached them when they won the World Cup in 2011, was coaching Argentina and New Zealand were playing against Argentina in the opening match at Wembley. I was there. My question would be what would happen in South Africa if a team of ours - cricket, rugby, soccer - if the coach who had won the World Cup in the previous outing is now coaching the opposition in the opening match. Would we invite him to lunch with the team the day before the game? I think not. They did that. The All Blacks invited Henry because he loves the guys, he is part of that brand, part of that passion, so why should they not invite him? They knew, if we are not smarter than him, if we don't train hard, then we don't deserve to win. It's about the culture.

Then afterwards, Sonny Bill Williams gave away his medal. Was it him or part of the culture? I would think it's part of the culture. Same with Richie McCaw. Why did he not retire in the World Cup? Because if he did, it would have been about him and not about the team, and he knew it needed to be about the team. That's my take.

How do you create a winning culture? 

Let's go back to rugby. Every World Cup that has been won since 1987, the core of that winning national team came from the club side that dominated. So that side knew how to win. Like in 1995, the core of our team was from the Lions. If you infuse that culture with incredible players, they will enhance the way you do things.




"We will look at trends, selection, stats and come up with recommendations" © IDI/Getty Images


Are there other elements that go into creating a winning team?

Form is very important and so are combinations - they have to work very well - and then there is leadership. How do the leaders close a game down, how do they make decisions, and how do you work with other leaders in the team to do that?

Rugby is a fairly simple game: it's about how easy you release pressure, your exit strategy, and how you stay unpredictable on attack. For that to happen, there are certain elements that need to fall into place. But the overarching thing is, do you have the right culture, have the right guys in form, have the right combinations and the leaders? Can they execute? And by leaders it's not only the captain, it's the coaches, the management staff. If you can do that right, you will be competitive a lot of the time, and if you can bottle that so that when the next guy comes, you pass the baton - you can't change that. Bottle it, understand it, love it. You'll be on the right track.

Is one of South Africa's problems that they have not found a way of gaining or transferring that knowledge? 

The transfer of knowledge is something I am quite interested in discussing. Do we do that, and what are the reasons for us not doing it? In rugby, we've never had that culture. We don't have ex-coaches, for example, involved. We have got universities, schools - how can we bottle that, how can we work together? The transfer of knowledge and the sharing of ideas, we need to rekindle that.

Will transformation form part of the review? 

Everything is open for discussion and it should be. If you want to do a proper job, you should have the opportunity to ask questions about all elements that enhance high-performance.

Only a dream can end a nightmare

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn


INDIA may be waking up from its unwarranted nightmare. A call has gone out from the head of its most impoverished and second-most populous province to cobble an anti-Hindutva alliance to foil a fascist takeover. The conditions look ripe. The economy is not shining.

There are many explanations. One is the piranha-like tycoons spawned by a neo-liberal ruling clique. In the rest of the world, neo-liberalism is being questioned. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn have lent voice to a global movement in India too. When university campuses reverberated with socialist slogans recently, the government moved swiftly to muzzle them. It contrived and slapped sedition charges on some of the most inspiring student leaders the country has seen.

Another explanation for the economic mess lies in straightforward loot. The mercantile capitalists embraced by Gandhi as the ‘trustees’ of free India have literally walked away with mega tons of people’s money. They have shown the banks a clean pair of heels. The Supreme Court is furious and wants names named. The national security adviser has stepped in with a more riveting agenda. He wants the courts to focus on national security instead; in other words to hang and jail more people, more swiftly.

To compound the nation’s woes, drought has arrived and monsoons are not due for at least two more scorching months. Much of the suffering this entails is predictably man-made. Millions are being kept parched so that the water tanker mafia, among other connected crony entrepreneurs, prospers.

Jack Nicholson as a sleuth investigated the great water heist in the formative days of California. That was in Polanski’s Chinatown when the snoopy hero nearly got his nose fed to the villain’s goldfish. A few good Indian journalists, led by Sreenivasan Jain and P. Sainath, are showing the red flag from parched swathes. Himanshu Thakkar, India’s respected expert on water management, is warning against its plunder in the heart of drought land, on lush golf courses.

The revered cow, essence of India’s refurbished nationhood, is in trouble. Many will perish by hunger, others by choking on plastic bags they scrounge in the absence of fodder. (The incidence of pedigree dogs being abandoned has increased, an indication that the urban middle class is feeling the pinch.)

An inordinately high number of farmers may be unable to stand up to the grim prospects. Some have committed suicide. Many more look just as vulnerable and could face starvation. The water minister says there is neither any need nor a way to prepare for a drought. A farmer’s two kindergarten children were on TV, sent off to Mumbai to find work and food.

Meanwhile, more illicit money has been found abroad. The Panama Papers could be only the tip of the iceberg. A two-year-old promise by the prime minister that he would put Indian Rs1.5 million from a separate tranche of retrieved money in everyone’s account has lapsed. His alter ego and party chief has described the promise as poll-year comment, not to be taken literally.

People are cursing their luck. The government is cursing the people. A faulty flyover being constructed in Kolkata has collapsed. The prime minister, in his election outfit, called it God’s curse on the ruling party of West Bengal. Then there was another man-made tragedy, in a temple in Kerala this time. Did we see someone biting his reckless tongue?

Being clumsy with rural folk has usually incurred a cost. Indian history is littered with episodes of peasant revolts. Drought and exploitation were and are at the source. The Patidar Movement of capitalist farmers in Gujarat is spinning out of control. The Jats are another prosperous agrarian community. They were used cynically against Muslims in western Uttar Pradesh. The ploy worked and it catapulted Modi in the general election. Now, faced with broken populist promises (which probably were not meant to be taken literally) the Jats are bracing for a showdown.

Remember that the Sikh peasants rose against the mighty Mughal empire and have refused to be subdued till today. When the state under Indira Gandhi sent the army against them, Sikh peasant-soldiers deserted the military in large numbers. The Indian Express report on Monday told a similar story from Haryana. Jat “policemen deserted their posts, sided with protesters,” said the front page lead story. The number of police deserters belonging to the Jat community was in the hundreds, the newspaper said, quoting unnamed highly placed sources privy to an official report being prepared on the flare-up.

History repeats itself, and that’s not a hollow cliché. With food scarcity in 1832 in Maharashtra, which is also the venue of India’s worst drought today, food riots spread against the moneylenders many of whose ilk form the current ruling elite. As for drought, peasants have historically attacked grain traders for practising witchcraft whereby they could stop rain. All this is recorded history.

We therefore need to take very seriously what Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar says for he is nothing if not a brilliant peasant leader. A day after becoming party chief last week, he demanded the “largest possible unity” against the BJP by bringing Congress, the Left and regional parties on one platform before the 2019 general elections.

There are crucial elections under way in four or five states. The BJP has little to no chance in West Bengal, Kerala or Tamil Nadu. If at all it makes headway it should be in Assam. But this could not be a reason for anyone to rest on his or her laurels. India is in ferment, and its people cannot afford to be caught napping yet again.

The question of forgiveness

Shiv Visvanathan in The Hindu



On May 18, standing before the House of Commons, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will offer a full apology for the Komagata Maru incident. File Photo


Canadian leader Justin Trudeau is to tender a full apology for the Komagata Maru incident of 1914. It should trigger similar repentance elsewhere for other sins of the past.

History rarely produces moments of epiphany, where politics appears as a creative act of redemption and the future becomes a collective act of healing. Each society carries its wounds like a burden, a perpetual reminder that justice works fragmentarily. Suddenly out of the crassness, the crudity of everyday politics, comes a moment to treasure. On May 18, standing before the House of Commons, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will offer a full apology for theKomagata Maru incident.

The drama of the ritual, the act of owning up to a wrong and voluntarily asking for forgiveness is rare in history. One immediately thinks of Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor, kneeling down during his visit to the Warsaw Ghetto and apologising to the Jews. The act was moving. For once instead of the mere word, the body spoke in utter humility as Brandt knelt before the monument. It was a sheer act of courage, responsibility and humility, an admission of a politics gone wrong, a statement of a colossal mistake that needed redemption.

Hundred years to atonement

This movement for forgiveness is important. Forgiveness adds a different world to the idea of justice. To the standard legal idea of justice as retaliation, compensation, forgiveness adds the sense of healing, of restoration, of reconciliation. Society faces up to an act of ethical repair and attempts to heal itself. Memory becomes critical here because it is memory that keeps scars alive, and memory often waits like a phantom limb more real than the event itself.

The Komagata Maru incident is over a hundred years old. But like the Jallianwala Bagh atrocity, it is a memory that refuses to die easily. It is a journey that remains perpetually incomplete, recycled in memory as Canada would not allow the homecoming.

Komagata Maru was a ship hired by Gurdit Singh, a Hong Kong/Singapore-based Sikh businessman, a follower of the Ghadar Party, who wanted to circumvent Canadian laws of immigration. The journey of 376 Indians, 340 of them Sikhs, began from Hong Kong. They finally reached Vancouver where a new drama of attrition began. British Columbia refused to let the passengers disembark, while Indians in Canada fought a rearguard struggle of legal battles and protest meetings to delay the departure. Passengers even mounted an attack on the police showering them with lumps of coal and bricks.

The ship was forced to return to Calcutta, 19 of the passengers were killed by the British and many placed under arrest. Komagata Maru was a symbol of racism, of exclusionary laws, a protest to highlight the injustice of Canadian laws. When Mr. Trudeau apologises, he will perform an act of healing where Canada apologises not only to India but to its own citizens, many of whom are proud Sikhs. The index of change is not just the ritual apology but another small fact. The British Columbia Regiment involved in the expulsion of the Komagata Maru was commanded between 2011 and 2014 by Harjit Sajjan, now Canada’s Minister of National Defence.

Apology and forgiveness

This incident echoes the need for similar apologies, acts of dignity which can repair political rupture. Imagine the U.S. apologising to Japanese prisoners imprisoned in World War II. Imagine Japan apologising for war atrocities. Think of the U.S. apologising for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Press even further and dream of Narendra Modi apologising to the victims of the Gujarat riots of 2002. One senses some of these dreams are remote and realises that, after nearly two years in office as Prime Minister, Mr. Modi does not have the makings of a Willy Brandt. Truth and healing are still remote to the politics of the majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party.

The very act of apologising and forgiveness reiterates the importance of memory and the vitality of the community as a link between past, present and future. It raises the question of the responsibility for the past and its injustices. Somehow for many politicians, the past is a different country for which they have no responsibility. Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard refused to apologise to the Aborigines, contending that present generations cannot be responsible for the past. Tony Blair was ready to apologise for the mid-19th century Irish potato famine but refused to apologise for the depredations of colonial rule. One is not asking for facile or convenient apologies, one is asking for a rethinking of politics. David Cameron, in February 2013, came close to an apology for Jallianwala Bagh. More than that, I think what one needs is a British apology for the Bengal famine of the 1940s which eliminated over three million people. It is a pity that it has not received a Nuremberg or a Truth Commission. I realise apology is a mere moral act without the materiality of reparation, but apology returns to the victim and the community the acknowledgement of human worth and dignity. Without the axiomatics of dignity, no human rights project makes any sense.

One must emphasise that forgiveness and apology are not sentimental acts constructing melodramatic spaces creating what French philosopher Jacques Derrida called “the grand scenes of repentance and theatricality”. Here, as Derrida claimed, is that rare moment where the human race shaken against itself examines its own humanity. Anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu is even more hard-headed when he says, “In almost every language, the most difficult words are ‘I am sorry’.” Mr. Tutu adds that spurious reconciliations can only lead to spurious healing. For him forgiveness is a wager, an ethical wager on the future of a relationship. This is why the few events of apology which stand up to critical scrutiny deserve to be treasured.

India’s own chequered past

One must realise the past haunts India. Truth-telling, truth-seeking and the dignity and the courage of rituals of apology and forgiveness may do a lot to redeem the current impasses of Indian politics. Indians have not forgiven history or what they call history for its injustices. Yet, the language, the philosophy of forgiveness adds to the many dialects of democracy. I am merely listing moments of apology which could change the face of Indian politics. I am not demanding a census of atrocity but a set of ethical scripts whose political possibilities could be played out. The effort is not to provoke or score points, but to help create a deeper reflection and reflexivity about the growing impact of violence in the Indian polity.

First, I would like Narendra Modi to apologise to the Muslim community and to India for the horror of the 2002 riots. The genocide of 2002 froze Gujarat and India at a point, and the thaw can only be an ethical one demanding the humility of truth and forgiveness. A lot has been written about the unfinished nature of the 1984 riots in which over 5,000 Sikhs lost their lives. I know Manmohan Singh did offer an apology, but the Congress’s behaviour has turned this into an impotent mumbling. In the rightness of things, the Gandhi family owes an apology to the Sikhs, something it has not had the ethical courage to venture. Third, as an Indian, I think one not only has to withdraw the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act but also apologise to the people of Kashmir and Manipur for the decades of suffering. One must request Irom Sharmila to end her 15-year-long fast demanding the withdrawal of the Act with dignity. There has been enough violence here, and it is time that we as a nation think beyond the egotism and brittleness of the national security state.

Each reader can add to the list and to the possibilities of a new ethical and moral politics which requires a Gandhian inventiveness of ritual and politics. What I wish to add is a caveat. The rituals of apology and the question of justice, reconciliation and ethical repair are not easy. They require a rigour and an inventiveness of ethical thinking which necessitate new experiments with the idea of truth and healing in India.

Mr. Tutu makes this point beautifully and wisely. He talks of the man known as the Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. In his book, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Wiesenthal spoke of a Nazi soldier who had burnt a group of Jews to death. As the Nazi lay dying in his deathbed, he confessed and asked for absolution from Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal found he could not forgive him. In the end, he asks the reader, “What would you have done?” — and The Sunflower is an anthropology of various responses.

We need an equivalence of The Sunflower experiment to ask Kashmiri Pandits, Kashmiri Muslims, Manipuris, Dalits, tribals, women what it would take for forgiveness after an act of atrocity. In fact, each one of us is a potential citizen, as perpetrator, spectator and victim, in that anthology. Is forgiveness and healing possible in the history of our lives? Democracy needs to think out the answers.

The Untold and Unofficial History of Pakistan

By Hamid Bashani

Part 1 (In Urdu)