/ 7 August 2009

Province of lost hopes

Ten years ago a young black schoolboy cricketer who plied his trade for the Soweto Cricket Club told the New York Times that he thought he was ready to play for South Africa.

The national cricket team had just defeated the West Indies five-nil in a Test series and the talk in cricketing circles was that nobody should be selected on the basis of his colour and the team should simply be chosen on merit, even if that meant fielding an all-white side.

Black players were of the opinion that it would be an insult to be included in the team just because of the colour of their skin. Sonnyboy Letshele disagreed, saying he would be willing to play for the national side because ”the one thing you need is an opportunity”.

But his opportunities from there on proved scarce. He played first-class cricket for the Gauteng ”B” side and was selected for only a smattering of matches for the ”A” side, then known as the Highveld Strikers.

When the prospects dried up in his home province, Letshele moved to Limpopo to play for their amateur side. But he found run-scoring as difficult as squeezing water out of a rock and his leg-spin bowling didn’t get quite as many wickets as he thought it would.

He made the journey home, disillusioned about and indifferent to the game that he had thought would bring him glory. Now he plays club cricket in Glenvista, albeit half-heartedly, and his dream of playing for South Africa remains but a line in the New York Times.

Letshele is just one of the young black hopefuls from Gauteng who have not been nurtured and developed by the Gauteng Cricket Board (GCB). The GCB is facing serious allegations of racial bias from a body calling itself ”the concerned cricket fraternity”, which, among other things, argues that the GCB leaves black players feeling disenfranchised, neglected and sidelined.

The fraternity makes a compelling case, highlighting players of colour who have been deemed not good enough to play franchise cricket and dropped in favour of either local white players or of black players from other provinces.

The GCB cannot answer for its policy, with its president, Barry Skjoldhammer, claiming the union is ”trying its best” to implement transformation and produce local cricketers of colour.

Why, then, has the board refused to give players like Johnson Mafa, Enoch Nkwe, Mpho Sekhoto, Geoffrey Toyana, Ziyaad Desai and Sushil Parbhoo a fair chance? Those names may not be familiar to the ordinary cricket supporter, but to those who have a deeper knowledge of the cricketing talent in the province, it seems absurd that not one of these players has established himself in the franchise team.

Mafa, a stalwart of the Gauteng amateur side, was honoured at the last Cricket South Africa (CSA) awards dinner as the best amateur player in the country, but Skjoldhammer claims that Mafa ”is not able to step up to the level of franchise cricket”.

Nkwe’s brief contract period, which was plagued by injuries, was marred by the batsman not being given enough game time to prove himself. He has since moved to the University of Fort Hare.

Sekhoto and Toyana were both talented run-scorers but were mismanaged and both moved to Easterns, with Toyana retiring recently. Desai and Parbhoo still play for the Lenasia Cricket Club and, despite consistently being in the league’s top 10, haven not been given sustained opportunity in senior teams.

The lack of transformation in the province reaches as far down as school level, where teams of colour find themselves poorly represented.

Mohsin Ahmed, the chairman of the Lenasia Cricket Club, said that ”the established and often white schools such as King Edward VII, St John’s and Jeppe Boys’ get their own teams, but the schools from Soweto, Eldorado Park and Lenasia have to combine into a development side”. This dilutes the talent of players in those areas, he said, and reduces the pool of players of colour eligible for higher selection. This accounts for the lack of development in players of colour from schools in the area.

Since no young players are coming through the system, and those who excel at league level are being ignored, the GCB is forced to go shopping every season for players of colour in other provinces. This time it’s the Dolphins’ Ugasen Govender who has been bought.

Skjoldhammer said it’s his job to ”grow young cricketers”, but offered no explanation for the reason Govender has been preferred to someone like Parbhoo, who ended as the league’s bowler of the year in the 2007-08 season.

The fraternity believes the GCB’s lack of transformation is present throughout the union, from the board, which has seven white members and only four black, to the Lions’ coaching staff, of which only one of the seven is of colour, and that unless the mind-set of those in charge alters dramatically, players like Letshele will grow not just disenchanted, but cynical and bitter about cricket.