South Africa went backwards in terms of cricketing performance in a traumatic year.
A few weeks back Graeme Pollock was asked how he thought Australia’s near-absolute stranglehold over South Africa might be broken. ”Get them on a plane and get them the hell out of here,” was his response.
This sentiment might not have been quite what was expected of a national selector — and Kepler Wessels, for one, has had a go at him for expressing it — but it pretty much summed up how most of the country felt.
This has been a traumatic summer for South African cricket, which found itself squaring off against Australia and coming off second best by a long way. And it wasn’t only the national team that found itself crumbling under the pressure. Our systems and methods, on and off the field, have been tested and in many instances found wanting. It is true that in both the long and short forms of the game Australia have opened up a gap on the rest of the field, but it is also true that South Africa have gone backwards.
There were three watershed moments during the summer: the Denness affair; the Sydney selection fiasco; and Daryll Cullinan’s withdrawal from the Newlands Test team.
Contrary to much of what was written and said at the time, the United Cricket Board (UCB), in the shapes of chief executive Gerald Majola and Percy Sonn, got it mostly right by staging the unofficial Centurion match against India.
South Africa were caught in the middle of what was effectively a power struggle between India and the International Cricket Council (ICC). Correspondence between the UCB and the ICC shows the game’s governing body gave South Africa tacit approval to play the match on an unofficial basis (while using an ICC match referee and two umpires who have now been appointed to the ICC umpires’ panel).
All the wailing about succumbing to blackmail was, with respect, claptrap. South Africa simply could not afford to break existing television contracts and the unofficial Test was not about saving face or buckling under government pressure, it was about avoiding a crippling financial blow. It is not insignificant that South Africa now has one of the five ICC match referees and two officials on the umpires’ panel. If there was a mistake, it was in not keeping the players fully informed, a fault the administration still needs to correct.
If Sonn largely coped well in treading a middle path in the Denness affair, he was clumsy and thoughtless in rejecting the South African team for the Sydney Test. The issue divided South African cricket along race lines like no other since unity and could and should have been avoided. Effectively Sonn rejected a player on the basis of skin colour. It has subsequently been suggested that this was not the first occasion Sonn had intervened. Whether this is the case has still not been made clear, but if it is true, both Sonn and the UCB were naive in thinking that it would not eventually become public knowledge. Of all sports, cricket is the most fertile breeding ground for gossip.
What is amazing, though, is why both Jacques Rudolph and Justin Ontong weren’t picked for Sydney with the series already lost. If nothing else, this would have spared us Sonn’s ridiculous explanation that Justin Ontong had been chosen as backup for the middle order and was therefore the appropriate replacement for Lance Klusener. Both Ontong and Rudolph disappeared towards the end of the season. So much for sensitive selection.
The brief Cullinan affair was notable not so much for Cullinan yet again being difficult, but for the fact that it initiated a chain of events that eventually led to Dr Mtutuzeli Nyoka resigning from both the UCB and the Gauteng Cricket Board.
The real moral of the story — apart from the obvious point that the national side needs players who actually want to play Test cricket — is that you can say the word ”transformation” to 10 different people and it will mean 10 different things.
After a year during which the UCB has been preoccupied with transformation with no one quite sure exactly what it means, Majola has asked 35 ”cricket brains” to attend a think tank on April 23. The idea is to find out what went wrong with South African cricket this summer and to explore means of fixing it.
It is a step in the right direction and it signals that the UCB has been rudely reminded that the core business of a cricket board is cricket. If this point of view is the starting point, then one or two results might follow: the first being that the UCB might be united in a common cause once again; and the second being that if all the myriad hidden agendas are put aside, then transformation might well take care of itself sooner than anyone thinks. If this does turn out to be the case, then some good may yet come out of this summer.
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa