Peter Robinson
When South Africa flew out to the West Indies this week, along with Western Province’s Gary Kirsten and Jacques Kallis went provincial team-mates Herschelle Gibbs and Paul Adams. They will be joined later in the tour by Roger Telemachus, while yet another WP player, Ashwell Prince, is strongly tipped to be picked for the South African A team later this month.
Now just hold that thought for a while and consider the Northerns Titans side, which played three semifinal legs before losing to KwaZulu-Natal in the Standard Bank Cup final. Two members of that team played in all four games, but didn’t bat and didn’t bowl Finley Brooker and Allahudien Paleker.
What Gibbs, Adams, Telemachus, Prince, Brooker and Paleker all have in common is that they are all, to use the United Cricket Board’s delicate terminology, “players of colour”. Where Western Province and Northerns come into it is that they are both required by current policy to field a minimum of two of these “players of colour”. This quota increases to three next summer.
What we have here are the opposite ends of the same problem. Next season Western Province could find themselves with four key members of the side (with Kirsten and Kallis) away on duty with national sides of some shape or form. They will have to replace them for provincial purposes. In effect, the fact that they have been so successful at integrating their side will count against them.
Northerns, meanwhile, are battling to comply. There seems little doubt that Brooker and Paleker are there to make up the numbers. In seven one-day games this season Brooker batted three times; Paleker had three innings in 11 matches. As thousands of youngsters have told their fathers after standing around in the outfield all day, cricket’s not much fun if you don’t get a bat or a bowl.
Next season Northerns will have to find a third “player of colour”. They would seem to have no other option than to go out and buy one and Western Province, for different reasons, might be there alongside them in the queue. The provinces that will ultimately suffer will be those like Boland who have pushed a stream of fine young players into the system.
With Newlands just down the road, Boland have always struggled to hold on to their own talent and it has been no secret this summer that Justin Ontong and Charl Langeveldt have become two of the most sought-after cricketers in the country. Don’t bet on them staying in Paarl for that much longer.
None of this is to criticise Western Province or Northerns, in many respects the best-run union in the country, or the United Cricket Board. But what it does suggest is that the one-size-fits-all quota policy needs to be re-examined. For reason founded in history and economics, cricket has a far greater hold in some parts of the country than others and while development is obviously the long-term solution, it is a process rather than an out-come. Buying players is the quick-fix answer to a pressing problem.
It seems time for the United Cricket Board to rethink its policy. This might mean granting exemptions to those unions, like Western Province and Boland, that have always exceeded the quota minimums and concentrating on ways of helping the Northerns and Gautengs meet the requirements. All coaches will claim that what they are trying to do is to produce South African players, but to do this they have to keep their jobs and one way of securing employment is by being successful on the field. You can’t expect any of them to be happy at not being allowed to field their strongest teams.
The up side of all this, of course, is that in a few years’ time a quota system will no longer be necessary. The process is self-evidently working, but a little more sympathy and understanding and fewer accusations of “dinosaur thinking” might help it along more profitably.
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa