The South African cricket authorities are to be congratulated for their achievements with regard both to the victories of Hansie Cronje’s men against India in the present series and the development of the game as a truly national sport.
But if our cricketers are showing the way where both sporting prowess and racial integration are concerned, their sponsors are less worthy of praise. South African Breweries (SAB) seems determined to reduce us to a rainbow nation of pot-bellied, alcoholic couch potatoes.
>From 9am, in the instance of the Kingsmead test, our television screens were awash with beer as gravelly voiced announcers urged us to “put one down the gully” … “hit a six” – reducing the language of a noble game to a jargon of drunkenness.
As the likes of Klusener, McMillan and Hudson put on a spectacle of skill and athleticism, one could imagine “Mr South Africa” burping and staggering his way to the refrigerator.
If television is as powerful a medium as broadcasters would have us believe, by the time morning tea rolled on and the players strolled off, cricket enthusiasts around the country must have been reduced to a state where they were incapable of as much as second-guessing the third umpire.
By the time stumps were drawn, most television spectators would have been unable to determine whether they were watching cricket or hurley (the pun is intentional, being of a kind with those of the Breweries).
The beer-drenched coverage of the tests surely merits intervention by Dr Nkosa-zana Zuma, to insist that the SABC carry a warning across the top and bottom of the screen: “Watching cricket can damage your health.”
The SABC also deserves censure for conniving with SAB in forcing viewers to watch the commercial breaks. It is questionable whether even Dave Richardson, behind the stumps, boasts the reflexes needed to stab the appropriate button on the remote control fast enough to avoid imbibing the call to inebriation in the flashed advertisements that mark the end of an over.
At risk of being accused of indulging in “left-wing claptrap” (a term used by a Breweries spokesman recently when the Mail & Guardian questioned its boasts as to the “natural” qualities of its products), we must protest to SAB: “It’s just not cricket!”