OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Wednesday 6.25pm.
RAYMOND White, who quit last month as president of the United Cricket Board of South Africa, launched a stinging attack on the country’s cricket administrators, accusing them of causing the sport to “fracture along racial lines.”
White, who opted out on February 11 after being accused by a UCB council member of retarding transformation, claimed the board has become “little more than the cricket organ of the (ruling) African National Congress.”
The attack, made at a public meeting last week but only reported on Wednesday are White’s first utterances on the state of the sport since he stepped down.
He said the UCB “was now a cesspool of self-interest and politics.”
“The black-white issue now dominates every decision of the UCB, which does not make the job of maintaining South African cricket at the pinnacle of the game at all easy.”
Off-field problems have to be addressed if the national team is not to slip further and further behind world champions Australia, White warned.
He said he is “extremely concerned” about government interference in the game. When he put up moderate resistance to this, he was “swept away” in “something like ethnic cleansing,” he said.
White said the South African government gave the UCB “tremendous stick, day after day, about choosing all-white teams.”
The government did not offer a single word of congratulation after the national team last year won the mini World Cup in Bangladesh, “murdered the West Indies” and won the Commonwealth Games.
“The only thing I heard was ‘when they were getting their gold medals in the Commonwealth Games, it would have been nice if they did not look like the England team’.”
He said a government campaign to get rid of him started after an impromptu speech he made in Cape Town at the end of the 1998/99 series against the West Indies in which he told politicians to keep their noses out of sport.
His remarks followed complaints by then Sports Minister Steve Tshwete that he was tired of seeing a “lily-white” national cricket team and that rising black stars should be given a chance to play for South Africa.
“The national team began to feel alienated and were very angry that the principle of merit selection had been departed from,” White said.
He described the current convenor of selectors, Rushdie Magiet, who replaced Peter Pollock when the UCB demanded more black representation at executive level, as “weak.” — AFP