cricket: Jon Swift
South African cricketers can truly be said to be in the process of charting new waters. To understand this, what goes on behind the scenes must be considered.
The most public changes are in personnel at national and provincial levels. Less obvious are the growth of the development programme and the ongoing oiled slickness of the administration.
Let us examine one aspect of what makes cricket tick so smoothly behind the public faces of United Cricket Board president Krish Mackerdhuj and his chief executive Ali Bacher.
The game’s administration has forged a policy of reward for its players that is tailored to remove the desperation so prevalent among professional sportsmen in many other codes.
Contracts for international players are forged on the results of the previous season for a specified number of tests and one-day internationals.
What this means in essence is that bringing in the new at the expense of the established — as has been the case with the selection of the squad to meet India in the first two tests of the current series — is an almost seamless process.
The older players left on the sideline have a year to either re-establish their claim or to gently ease their way out of cricket at international level. It is a mature way to do things.
It also has the advantage of keeping the more experienced senior players in the game, a far less spendthrift use of talent than is practised in many other sports, where the axe effectively severs the umbilical cord forever.
Because of this process — doubtlessly difficult for cricketers like Jonty Rhodes, Fanie de Villiers and Pat Symcox who are the latest to be left out of the test squad — dropped players are never excluded entirely. No greater proof of that is the way South Africa persisted with the huge talent and brittle physique of left-arm seamer Brett Schultz. It is an enlightened way to run a sport.
We are equally blessed in this country with Hansie Cronje, a captain young enough to handle the veterans. Cronje’s management of Paul Adams and Herschelle Gibbs and his perseverance with Lance Klusener which paid such huge dividends in the second innings (eight for 64) at Calcutta, has been an exercise some captains of industry would do well to follow.
Equally, Cronje has been the binding factor when a seemingly unbeatable side has slipped at the final hurdle as was the case in the World Cup against the current crop of enigmatic West Indians and in the series just completed in India.
But then it is well to regard these glitches as defeats rather than failures. The overall record of the team must, by the application of some very simple logic, enforce this view.
For surely, it would be churlish to ignore the contributions of Gary Kirsten with a century in each innings, the marvellously crafted 153 career-best from Daryll Cullinan, Andrew Hudson’s century — and his fatherly shielding of debutant Gibbs at the crease — or the superb seam bowling of Allan Donald and the miserly spin of Symcox as being worthy of remembrance from the established members of the side.
It is into this ethos that the youngsters in the shape of Adams, Gibbs, Klusener, Shaun Pollock, Jacques Kallis and Adam Bacher have forced their way. They represent the vanguard of a whole echelon of emerging players who, as Ali Bacher so rightly says “will lead us into the next five or six years”.
Bacher’s nephew Adam — “I tell people he’s my son when he’s doing well and my nephew when he isn’t,” says the former South African captain in a moment of familial flippancy — has truly been a revelation with the bat this season, scoring three centuries including a double century and a fifty in notching up the almost unbelievable average of 128,75 in the provincial Supersport Series. His claims simply could not be ignored.
And encouragingly there are others. Border wicketkeeper-batsman Mark Boucher boasts an average of over 85 and, with another good season behind him, must come into the reckoning alongside Nic Pothas of Transvaal and Paul Kirsten of Western Province as a successor to Dave Richardson when the old warhorse finally decides to stand down.
Among this season’s form batsmen, the claims of the Free State pair Boeta Dippenaar and Gerhardus Liebenberg, Sven Koenig of Western Province and the sparkling talents of young Niel Mackenzie of Transvaal are there as signposts to the future.
And with Schultz still in the wings — the unkind critics have described his new provincial alliances as “swopping from the Eastern Province injury list to the Western Province injury list” — some attention will have to be paid to left-arm seamer Gary Gilder and Ross Veenstra in the days to come. Makhaya Ntini has also started to make his mark as a bowler.
Ntini can fairly be said to spring from the development programme that cricket has poured so much time, effort and resources into . But it must be noted that, while there is little in a programme that encourages youngsters to play cricket that is not inherently meritorious, it is nevertheless still a programme of intense selectivity at present.
This will change as the game makes further inroads into “disadvantaged areas”.
Perhaps more convincing and important to the overall good of cricket though is the United Cricket Board’s thrust to get the clubs countrywide to mentor young black aspirant players. It would be insanity not to do it this way, for while it is unlikely that this will immediately throw a host of Brian Laras, Curtly Ambroses or Richie Richardsons into the South African limelight at top level, it will ensure that the game becomes a greater part of the fabric of our overall society.
And this journey, more than any other that the game will undertake in the next decade or so, will be truly indicative of where we have come from and where we are going.