Even as Herschelle Gibbs and Gary Kirsten murdered the Griqua bowling at Newlands last week, you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief heaved at the United Cricket Board (UCB) offices.
Although the restructuring of provincial cricket in South Africa has been put on hold until later this year it remains perhaps the most pressing issue to be dealt with by the UCB in the short and medium term. And while no definite recommendations for this restructuring have yet been made, most thinking tends towards an eventual regrouping of the first-class game on a regional basis.
Which all seemed well and good until Easterns upset the apple cart by beating Western Province in the SuperSport Series final. Barely had the hangovers at Willowmoore Park eased when Easterns said, more or less: Hang on a minute. You want us to merge with Northerns? Well, in that case let’s base this regional team in Benoni. After all, we’re the champions.
And there was every chance that Easterns’s success might have been emulated by another so-called minor union until Griquas froze and fell apart at Newlands.
So where does this leave the UCB which has to find a way of streamlining an overloaded and ultimately unsustainable provincial system? Let’s look at it another way. South Africa has 11 provincial unions of which five — Gauteng, Western Province, Natal, Eastern Province and Northerns — represent the traditional power base.
A further two, Border and Free State, have been around for a long time as well, but only in the past decade have they made a serious impact on provincial cricket. You probably would now have to add Griquas, who were in at the start of provincial cricket in South Africa, to this pairing. The remaining three, North West, Boland and Easterns, are the new kids on the block.
The standard of cricket has dipped markedly in the years since readmission. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, international cricket takes the best 15 or 16 or 17 players in the country out of the provincial system for much of the season. And secondly, the pool of talent is spread too thinly across 11 unions.
Regionalisation is not the answer, not at this stage anyway. What needs to happen, as a matter of some urgency, is the introduction of a two-division first-class competition, split six and five, with automatic promotion and relegation. If some of the bigger unions, Gauteng for instance, find themselves in the lower league, then so be it.