New sponsors and new faces will greet cricket fans at the start of next season
CRICKET: Jon Swift
IN sport, very much as in life but in an abbreviated and upfront way, one year past brings with it the inevitable promise of the 12 months ahead. So it is with South African cricket.
The game in this country is experiencing a sea change on many levels. The corporations which have kept the game alive with generous sponsorships for years are changing. The powerbases of the game in this country are slowly shifting and the new faces of tomorrow are starting to emerge.
The day-night series, so comprehensively won by Free State by a 142-run margin over a Transvaal side powerless to manufacture a reply to the belligerent onslaught by Bradley Player, will show a new face next season.
B&H, who devised and developed the limited overs pyjama game, make way for Standard Bank. One trusts that the playing gear will not assume a uniform grey next season. On a serious note, the new sponsors have balanced the books on projections quite well. There is sufficient emphasis on development to ensure a continuing upsurge of interest in the game and, at the top end, have underwritten a series which has done much to bring spectators into the game.
It would not be too far-fetched to say that the average fan or TV enthusiast would regard the winners of the day-night series as the true champion side rather than the winners of the more traditional provincial competition.
In this respect, the Castle Cup will fade from the scene next season. South African Breweries, a company that has done much to promote sport — and provide celebratory material for the winners and consolation for the losers — have sadly backed out of cricket after a long and, one would hope, mutually fruitful partnership.
As a company, they have doubtless looked at the volume of sales of their products in the soccer-mad townships and weighed them against returns from the areas where cricket predominates. The company has, quite logically, decided to fish where the fish are. And if that means Mark Fish in their case, who can blame them?
A new sponsor is due to be announced soon but the previous sponsors have the satisfaction of knowing that the team fridges in the dressing rooms will almost certainly continue to echo the years they spent in the game.
Which leads from the financial power bases of the game to the strongholds of cricket on the field. There can be little doubt that the most successful of these is Free State who achieved the third win in as many years in the day-night series with that staggering devastation of Transvaal.
A little more than a decade ago, the province was one of those pleasant stop-overs on a cup campaign. True, they played attractive cricket, but then they didn’t win much. This has changed dramatically.
A concentrated effort to raise the standard of the game on the ver verlate vlaktes worked wonders.
Free State have always worked on a mixture of youth and experience. They have drafted in players like Alvin Kallicheran, Sylvester Clarke, Omar Henry and Franklyn Stephenson and let the kind of day-to-day master class players of this calibre provide in a tightknit community to wash over the youngsters.
It has worked. The emergence of Hansie Cronje, first chosen to captain Free State at an unworldly-wise 21, as a player of class and captain of diplomacy and deliberation is proof enough of this without listing the Nicky Bojes and Boeta Dippenaars who have come through.
In this respect it would be simplistic to place all the emphasis of the Free State victory on Bradley Player’s contributions, significant though 83 off 50 balls and 3/36 may have been in the context of the final — or indeed on the superb seam bowling of Allan Donald and Stephenson. It was a team effort and deserves to be judged as such.
So too, was the effort of Transvaal, made to climb the mountain that Free State had built in the first 15 overs. The final was effectively over by the time the fielding restictions had been lifted.
Yet too much cannot be made of the fact that the essentially young side under Ken Rutherford had battled their way into the final at all. They may not be another Super Side of the Seventies, but they have lifted the game in the province enormously under the astute leadership of the former Kiwi captain. Despite the battleship-like look of the Wanderers, it is almost fun to visit the ground again these days.
Griquas will play in the provincial competition next year, spreading the game at top level even further. Sides like the Kimberley-based combination and the enthusiastic team Easterns coach Jimmy Breakey is slowly building at Springs provide a new hope for the game’s future.
We are endowed with a surfeit of talent at youth level. Development will add even more sinew to this developing muscle. It is time then that the United Cricket Board starts looking at some options.
One of these is an idea which has been mooted by Boland coach Hylton Ackerman: give him a number of talented young cricketers for a stipulated two seasons, let them loose on cricket at top provincial level to experience the pressures of cup competition … and then make them free agents to go to any province they like.
Accompany this idea with something akin to the American draft system and the power base will spread. The Americans are past masters of the art of ensuring that the public gets its money’s worth.
They work it like this: the side which finished bottom of the league, gets first choice of theyoungsters — in the case of South African cricket, the South African schools or development players. In this way, if Easterns or Boland or Griquas are short of an opening bat or a seam bowler, they are first in the queue to fill that need from emerging talent.
It has the effect of making the provinces with less cash resources more competitive and the competitions less lopsided. Sport, like, life, is seldom as simple as this, but it is something to consider as the seasons flow inexorably one into the next.