Meaningless matches on second-rate pitches will not draw people back to first-class cricket Peter Robinson
Last Friday Stephen Fleming’s New Zealand tourists piled themselves into their team bus at the crack of dawn and trundled off into the Eastern Cape hinterland to play perhaps the most pointless match of their South African tour a one-day game against a Border Invitation XI in Alice.
By no stretch of the imagination could this game, sandwiched between the first and second Test matches, have served any purpose whatsoever for New Zealand, but Fleming’s team have been polite and uncomplaining ambassadors in South Africa and they got on with their obligation.
Which is not to say that there weren’t a few eyebrows raised in the New Zealand camp when they had their first look at the Ntselamanzi Cricket Ground. The field slopes steeply down from one side to the other, the outfield is thick and bumpy and the pitch was covered with what initially looked a dangerously liberal spread of grass.
There was serious discussion before the match started about playing a festival game, but rather than making the ball fly all over the place, the heavy layer of grass tended to deaden the bounce and no one’s life was seriously threatened.
As it happened anyway, the Border captain Pieter Strydom decided not to call upon Makhaya Ntini to bowl the final overs because the light had faded badly on a miserably cold, grey day.
The point of the exercise is development, to take the game into areas where top-level cricket has seldom, if ever, been seen. But this was the second match in as many summers in Alice and it is not entirely clear why this should be so. Certainly, the day allowed the past and present ministers of sport to swan about among their constituents and Alice, home of the University of Fort Hare, has emotional and historic ties with the government.
But as far as spreading the game, why Alice with its rudimentary facilities? Why not, for argument’s sake, Queenstown or any number of quiet country towns in the region where cricket is not the sole preserve of the white community.
And, more to the point, why not stop being sheepish about development and go the whole hog. Instead of tagging three or four hopeful black youngsters on to predominantly white teams to play against touring sides, why not pick a team comprised of the best “formerly disadvantaged” players, including the Test and one-day international caps, award them colours of one kind or another and give them a genuine three- or four-day first-class match against a touring side?
I suggest this partly as an alternative to the informal quota system currently employed by cricket, partly because the “symbolic” matches that have been played for the past few years are so obviously public relations exercises that they have become meaningless, but mostly because I’d like to watch a team fronted up by a seam attack consisting of Ntini, Mfuneko Ngam and Garnett Kruger take on international opposition.
And I’d like to watch a side where the taint of tokenism, which inevitably drifts into quota selections, is eliminated. Call it a President’s XI if you want, and play it on a ground where there are first-class facilities, in East London, for instance, or Paarl, and a community that might be persuaded to watch a first-class match purely out of interest.
For several years all the good intentions that have gone into development, as in “development players”, have been undermined by the implicit assumption that a player whose skin colour is a factor in his selection has not been picked entirely on merit.
Twist this thinking around a little by celebrating skin colour rather than pretending to look the other way. Make it an honour to play for an all-black (and brown and yellow) South African team which, by performance, could squash any suggestion of tokenism. And use it as a marketing tool to persuade the doubters (black and white) that cricket is a game for all South Africans.
Which brings us to another point. No matter that Allan Donald was heading towards 300 wickets, the attendances for the Bloemfontein Test match were pitiful.
Any number of reasons can be advanced for the reluctance of the public to watch Test match cricket, from the type of pitches produced to the quality of the opposition to the timing of Test matches.
But perhaps cricket has to look back to itself and the twin threats of wall-to-wall television coverage and the ascendancy, in the public mind, of the one-day game. The long and the short of it is that people don’t have to go to grounds to watch Test cricket and, in any case, they’ve been persuaded that the one-day version is sexier and more fun.
In other words, it’s not a case of cricket eating its young. Rather, the young are steadily eating cricket.
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa