At last, there is some action regarding the infamous Gauteng Lions management scorecard – and it is such a sneaky outcome that you don’t know if you should laugh or cry.

Whether Albert van den Berg was pushed or whether he jumped will probably come out during the legal storm that is now brewing, but he and the Lions have parted company.

What makes it a joke (and it’s not a funny ha-ha joke) is that Van den Berg is one of a few guys who got reasonable scores and should have been retained. But, no! He has been fired, basically because he has blown the whistle about the mismanagement that has been going on behind the scenes. Or simply put, he has been fired for telling the truth.

A legal battle about screenshots and who violated whose privacy is looming which will most probably be settled out of court.

All of this comes after the Lions players did a scorecard of their management and the ratings were embarrassing, to put it mildly.

The whole thing started at about the end of January. The survey was obviously done to prove a point and of course, bias can’t be ruled out, but the results (surprise, surprise) gave the managers some amazingly poor ratings.

According to IOL Sport, the players gave head coach Crash Van Rooyen a rating of between three and four out of 10 on a number of questions.

Only assistant coach Albert van den Berg and defence coach Jaque Fourie received a pass mark of between seven and eight out of 10.

Conditioning coach Stefan van Deventer and backline coach Ricardo Laubscher got poor ratings.

Famously, ops manager, Tracy van Ginkel scored a statistically impossible -3. She is the one who is responsible for the travel and accommodation arrangements of the Lions. While all South African unions are battling with the horrendous costs to get the players from one corner of the earth to the other every other weekend, her score tells the story.

The one character who has remained behind the curtains in this murky drama is CEO Rudolf Straeuli.

Straeuli is famous for being in the World Cup-winning Springbok squad of 1995 – and infamous for being the Springbok coach who approved “Kamp Staaldraad”, one of the blackest chapters in the history of South African rugby.

As head of the Gauteng Lions, he ducked out of the firing line by not being rated on the scorecard and promising that he will comment once he has seen the ratings.

We are now heading towards the end of May, and to this day he is still saying that he will comment when the time is right.

The situation at the Gauteng Lions Company is nowhere near as evil as Kamp Staaldraad was, but unless something dramatic happens (and it will have to be very dramatic), surely the boss of the business should take the punch.

But that is not going to happen, is it? CEOs rarely fire themselves. Instead, Albert van der Berg got fired. Firing the wrong guy is always an option.

_{Pictured above: Albert van den Berg}

_{Image source: Twitter}