South African cricket shot itself in the foot once again with the Cullinan debacle
Peter Robinson
For the Newlands Test the South African team have been put up in Cape Town’s Cullinan hotel. After the obligatory pause for a hollow laugh, it hardly needs pointing out that Daryll didn’t make it into the foyer.
Cullinan’s negotiations with United Cricket Board (UCB) chief executive Gerald Majola started on Monday evening and were concluded on Tuesday morning by cellphone with Cullinan walking in through the arrivals gate and out through the departure lounge on the first flight back to Johannesburg. The two men did not sit down face to face and talk it out.
In essence, when Cullinan was told he would not be offered an A category contract he told South African cricket to shove it. After issuing a statement on Tuesday, he went on the stump on Wednesday, apparently making himself available to every radio and TV station that called him.
On Cape Talk on Wednesday, Cullinan was all self-righteous indignation, veering into incoherence at times. Sometimes he sounded as if he was about to burst into tears. At one point he tried to argue that the Australian board encouraged their players to play county cricket, but when it was pointed out that the Australian board would not countenance county commitments interfering with the availability of their players for Test matches, he abruptly changed the subject.
To be fair to Cullinan, every now and then he made a good point. So, occasionally, does Robert Mugabe, but this doesn’t mean that you can make sense of either man. The fact is that Cullinan walked out on a Test team, he rejected the honour of playing for his country and this is how he will be remembered: not for the runs he scored in 70 Tests for South Africa, but for baling out. Who cares why.
The cynics have already started to suggest that the real reason for Cullinan’s decision to quit was that he didn’t have the stomach for another confrontation with Shane Warne. For a man as conscious and proud of his Test record as Cullinan, he has left himself wide open to accusations of cowardice.
What Cullinan’s action does illustrate is the yawning gap that exists between the players and administrators in South African cricket. When the convener of selectors pretty much has to be ordered to consult with the coach before picking a team, it explains why South Africa have spent much of the summer looking like a team without a game plan. The simply fact is that they haven’t had one. You can’t just choose 11 players, throw them at the coach and expect a strategy to pop ll out of a bowling machine like some sort of genie from a bottle.
None of this, however, explains or justifies Cullinan. Neither, though, should the Gauteng Cricket Board have suspended the player. Whatever you feel about Cullinan’s treatment of his national team, he surely is legally entitled to seek the best deal he can get for himself and, if it does not suit him, refuse the offer. It is the timing and manner of Cullinan’s actions that are offensive, not the fact of them.
If Cullinan really believes that he has a worthwhile point to make, it would have been better made by playing (and, as it turns out, captaining the team) in the Test match and then asking for a contract. A heavy-handed response by the UCB or one of its affiliates will serve no one any good. It has emerged that the UCB has given four players Shaun Pollock, Mark Boucher, Jacques Kallis and Gary Kirsten contracts until after next year’s World Cup.
For no good reason, the UCB chose not to tell anyone about these contracts, providing yet another example of the obsession with secrecy that currently pervades the organisation and that inevitably creates far worse problems than it solves. In the light of these contracts, Cullinan was surely entitled to seek something for himself. Whether he deserved similar treatment is entirely another matter.
What he did was leave his team-mates in the lurch. There are three new caps in the Test match that starts on Friday against the best team in the world, and another with just one cap. In the absence of Pollock, there seems no one in the attack likely to block up one end and prevent the Australians galloping along at four to the over. The batting order will be juggled once again in order to fit in Graeme Smith.
What is encouraging, though, is that all the new boys still regard it as an honour to play for their country.
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa