For South African cricket, 2002 hardly had the most auspicious starts. The New Year Test against Australia in Sydney was played against a backdrop of bitter squabbling after United Cricket Board (UCB) president Percy Sonn intervened to force the selection of Justin Ontong at the expense of Jacques Rudolph.
To describe Sonn’s action as divisive is to understate the case. One senior UCB official was at Newlands a few days into the new year and said, privately, that every white person he spoke to was outraged by Sonn’s interference while every coloured person he met backed Sonn to the hilt.
In many ways this was only to be expected. The scars of the past have self-evidently not fully healed and transformation, its aims and how best to achieve them, remains a sensitive issue. At the same time, though, it is difficult not to believe that the Ontong affair could have been better handled. If Sonn felt it necessary to step in, why didn’t he simply ask that both Ontong and Rudolph play in the Test? Rudolph had done nothing to deserve such shabby treatment and it seems that neither young player has completely recovered from the furore.
What the incident also served to underline was the almost complete breakdown in communication between the administration, the selectors and the team. Central to this was the selection convener, Rushdi Magiet, who, by this time, had stopped talking to the coach, Graham Ford, and, if the row in Sydney was anything to go by, his president.
Magiet’s tenure as convener, in fact, was marked by increasing confusion and an almost complete inability to understand the needs of the players. Palpably out-of-form players were either retained or picked while those in form were overlooked. There was no obvious pattern or plan behind selections, Ford became increasingly disillusioned and the captaincy of Shaun Pollock, an instinctive cricketer, seemed to increasingly depend on guesswork.
As a result, South Africa were hammered in the Test matches in Australia before restoring some pride by winning the triangular knockout tournament. Then Australia came here and hammered South Africa in both the Tests and the one-day series.
Heads, inevitably, had to roll and Magiet and Ford were both unceremoniously dumped. You had to feel sorry for Ford, whose record up to Australia had been impressive and whose low-key approach worked best on a one-to-one level. He did himself few favours, though, when he greeted the UCB’s new cricket committee, driven through by chief executive Gerald
Majola, with less than wholehearted enthusiasm. At a time when a willingness to move forward was required, Ford’s response was at best lukewarm.
So out went Magiet and Ford and in came the cricket committee, Eric Simons as coach and Omar Henry and a new panel of selectors. The winter, though, was also marked by the death of Hansie Cronje in a plane crash, bringing to an end a thoroughly unhappy chapter in the history of South African cricket.
There remain some unanswered questions regarding Cronje’s finances, but there appears little enthusiasm to pursue them and it is likely that the full story of the match-fixing affair will never be told.
The UCB also brought the wrath of Minister of Sports and Recreation Ngconde Balfour down upon itself when it decided to scrap quotas at national and senior provincial levels. At the same time, quotas at all lower levels were increased, but this point was largely ignored by Balfour who appointed a hand-picked task force and sent them off to discover that the UCB had not yet transformed itself to his satisfaction.
Finally the UCB had had enough of the minister and released minutes of two meetings with him in which he was revealed to be a blustering bully, an image far removed from the jovial fan who regularly appears on television. It is difficult to take Balfour’s opinions of Jacques Kallis seriously in a racist sense, but the minutes did expose a thoughtless man who cannot understand people who do not leap to his beck and call. The minutes did persuade Balfour to divert his attentions from cricket for the time being, although it is unlikely that we have heard the last of him.
South Africa, meanwhile, built up to next year’s World Cup with unsuccessful campaigns in Morocco and Sri Lanka and more profitable home series against a wholly inadequate Bangladesh team, Sri Lanka and, now, Pakistan.
Australia are the World Cup favourites, but on home soil South Africa should make an impact. In the hurly-burly of one-day cricket, particularly when the tournament reaches the knock-out stages, anything is possible, but along with Australia and South Africa, Pakistan could well reach the semifinals with perhaps New Zealand or India as the fourth team.
It should be a spectacular couple of months, with the attention of the cricketing world focused sharply on South Africa. Provided the political showboating is kept to a minimum, the tournament can be expected to be a roaring success.
There will be some clearing out in the national team after the tournament which will provide swansongs to the international careers of Allan Donald and Jonty Rhodes. It has long been speculated that Lance Klusener might call it a day after the World Cup, while at one point it was hinted that Pollock and, God forbid, Kallis were also thinking of quitting. As far as the latter two are concerned, the rumours have almost completely subsided.
Unlike South African rugby, cricket is far more flexible in allowing its players to chase English pounds.
Andrew Hall, for instance, has a county contract next year that would be renegotiated if he is chosen for the five-Test tour of England.
Which brings us to Gary Kirsten, who has made a compelling late charge for a World Cup place. Kirsten has given no indication that he is thinking of stepping aside but, more to the point, can South Africa really contemplate five Test matches against England without Kirsten at the top of the order?
South Africa’s last Test series triumph in England took place in 1965. This thought, together with the fact that Australia are currently reducing England to complete disarray, might prove an irresistible temptation for Kirsten, not to mention the likes of Pollock, Kallis and any number of South African players.