With the obvious exception of Neil McKenzie — who may, with hindsight, come to view his omission as a stroke of good fortune — a full-strength South African team leaves for Sri Lanka on Sunday for the International Cricket Council (ICC) Trophy tournament.
This is, of course, as it should be, but the situation was by no means as clear-cut on Monday this week.
As has been the case around the cricketing world, the United Cricket Board (UCB) and the South African Players’ Association had been engaged in negotiations prompted by the contractual dispute between the ICC and the world’s leading players that has rumbled on for several weeks. By all accounts, the discussions between the UCB and the players’ body had been amicable. No one really believed it would come to the point where the South Africans would dig in their heels and refuse to go to Sri Lanka.
At the root of the problem is a demand by the ICC that players forego personal contracts during a number of events, which include the ICC Trophy and, more significantly, next year’s World Cup. The players believe such a restriction might place them in the position of having to dis- honour personal contracts.
The players have a valid point. Equally, it is understandable that the ICC should wish to provide, for instance, World Cup sponsors with a certain measure of exclusivity. The real problem has been thrown up by the fact that for almost two years after the World Cup deals were set up, neither the ICC nor its constituent national boards worked through the issues.
Even so, with the exception of India, most countries were able to sit down with players’ associations and arrive at workable compromises, and this looked like being the case in South Africa. Until Percy Sonn walked in.
The UCB president had not been party to last week’s discussions with the players, but he arrived on Monday and, perhaps predictably, everything went pear-shaped within hours. Before Monday was out, Sonn had suspended the negotiations, effectively kicked the head of the UCB legal committee, Brandon Foot, out of the talks, threatened the South African team with disciplinary action and tried to place the South African A team on standby for Sri Lanka.
Quite what Sonn was doing in the negotiations in the first place is unclear. The negotiations were clearly an operational matter as far as the UCB is concerned and should have been left to chief executive Gerald Majola and whichever of the UCB’s various committees or departments were concerned.
This is not the first time that Sonn has bullocked into a matter and invariably it has been left to someone else to sort out the mess. This time it was Majola who met the players’ association on Tuesday to work out an agreement which allowed the team to take part in the Sri Lanka tournament.
Decide for yourself what is contained between the lines of this quote from association CEO Tony Irish: “We are very grateful to Gerald Majola for all his efforts. I have great respect for Mr Majola, he is a man of great integrity who has cricket interests at heart and we have an extremely constructive relationship.”
That the UCB should be a trifle wary of a players’ association is understandable. If the association does its job properly, it will have to insist on being part of the solution to the many problems that face South African cricket, not the least of them being finding a workable and, to use a word much in currency, sustainable plan for first-class cricketers. This, according to Irish, is at least part of the body’s intentions.
If the players organise themselves properly it would be for the benefit of South African cricket as a whole. And so would the game benefit if the administration were equally well organised. Sonn’s interference almost inevitably undermines the work of Majola and at a time when cricket is having a finger wagged at it by Parliament’s sports committee, Majola needs all the help he can get.