The end of the Kolpak era could prompt South Africa’s players to give up on cricket as a career altogether.
Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE in South Africa
IT’S tough being a cricketminded South African. But cheer up: you could have been Zimbabwean, Zambian or Croatian.
The administrative bodies from those countries have been suspended by the International Cricket Council (ICC), so Zimbabwe, Zambia and Croatia cannot play in tournaments. It gets worse for Morocco, who have been expelled from the ICC.
That the game is in trouble in South Africa is beyond doubt. On the field and off, the challenges mount by the week.
Some of this is beyond cricket’s control. The game is a victim of a faltering society that is at the mercy of a shaky economy.
Cricket cannot be immune from the effects of those factors. It doesn’t help that enough players are able to export their skills to accelerate the hollowing out of the game in our country.
That could change, what with English counties having been warned by the England Cricket Board that their Kolpak players would be ineligible if the United Kingdom (UK) leaves the European Union (EU) without negotiating a deal.
No deal has yet been agreed. So as things stand the UK — now under the control of reckless idiot Boris Johnson, the new Trumpian Prime Minister — will crash out of the EU on October 31.
So all current Kolpak players, and all wannabe Kolpak players, could be out of a job after the 2020 English season.
Which sounds like a reason to be cheerful: players will no longer be syphoned off by the county system’s better salaries and England’s better working and living conditions.
Except that the end of the Kolpak era could also prompt South Africa’s players to give up on cricket as a career altogether.
With the Indian Premier League having apparently fallen out of love with our players and no more chance to catch a county’s Kolpak eye, better to find a proper job rather than put up with the ailing franchise system.
Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) plan to scrap that arrangement in favour of doubling the number of domestic sides may or may not have been shelved — it depends who you ask, and which day you ask them — but doubtless it would only hasten the disappearance of skills and experience from the talent pool in favour of more grown-up ways to earn a crust.
So cricket’s biggest challenge in South Africa isn’t Kolpak, whether or not it survives the joke who is Johnson and his merry pranksters. Instead, it’s avoiding the Zimbabwefication of the game.
Cricket north of the Limpopo is rarely not in crisis. It’s landed itself in the dwang this time because the government of mini-Mugabe Emmerson Mnangagwa, in the shape of the Sports and Recreation Commission (SRC), a state agency, forbade Zimbabwe Cricket (ZC) from electing their own board.
The election went ahead anyway, and the new board and their acting chief executive were promptly prevented from assuming their posts by the SRC. ZC complained to the ICC about government interference. The ICC concurred, and so ZC were suspended.
Think that kind of thing can’t happen in South Africa? Think again. As we speak, what a source called “messy, sly” efforts are afoot to keep the president of one of CSA’s most influential unions in office because he is aligned to powerful figures at the level above.
Hark: where there are suits there is also a bad smell.
Bulletproof Truth 