Thirty-four South Africans are or have been on the 18 first-class counties’ books this English summer, and only two clubs have been untouched by the biltong brigade.
Times Select
TELFORD VICE in London
THE first centurion of this year’s men’s county T20 competition was born in Durban on May 12, 1989, played for KwaZulu-Natal’s junior teams and made his first-class debut for them, and duly graduated to the Dolphins.
Not quite two weeks before his 18th birthday he was part of a team that included Nick Compton, Eoin Morgan and Steve Smith. Their opponents featured Matthew Kleinveldt — Rory’s cousin — and Mervyn Westfield — who, three years later, would be arrested and then released in a police probe into betting irregularities.
The match was at Chelmsford, and pitted the Essex and Sussex second XIs against the Kent and Middlesex second XIs.
You could disappear deep down the rabbit holes of the Cricket Tragic’s Bumper Book of Trivia Questions if you followed any of those leads. So, in the interests of our own sanity, let’s stick to just one.
The Durbanite in that 12-a-side four-day match at Chelmsford was Cameron Delport, who batted at Nos. 6 and 7 for his scores of 66 and 39, hitting 82 of them in fours and sixes, and neither bowled nor took a catch. His team, Kent and Middlesex, won by 10 runs.
A dozen years on, Delport has played 61 first-class matches: all but one of them in South Africa. The exception was also the last time he appeared in whites — for Leicestershire against Glamorgan at Grace Road in April 2017.
Not that Delport has sat around waiting for things to happen. Instead he’s played 198 T20s for 15 different outfits on 49 different grounds in 15 different countries.
He was back at Chelmsford for Essex against Surrey two Fridays ago, when he took 129 off 49 balls in six minutes more than an hour of mayhem. Only 17 of those runs were actually run; no mean feat considering Surrey’s attack bristled with Jade Dernbach, both Currans — Sam and Tom — Gareth Batty and Rikki Clarke, who hold 42 all-format international caps between them, and cricket’s youngest oldster, the freshly retired Imran Tahir.
The competition’s next highest score is the 117 Dawid Malan hit off 54 balls for Middlesex against Surrey at the Oval on Tuesday. Strange as it may seem going on the sound of his name, Malan was born in London. But his father, also Dawid, played for the Western Province and Northern Transvaal B teams and junior was brought up in South Africa.
Until Tuesday, the competition’s next highest score was the 88 not out AB de Villiers made for Middlesex against Delport’s Essex at Lord’s on Thursday, and Hardus Viljoen is joint eighth among wicket-takers.
Saffers are sprinkled liberally around the traps. Simon Harmer, Colin Ingram, Dane Vilas and Colin Ackerman are captaining their teams, and Chris Morris and Dwaine Pretorius are overseas players.
Discounting Malan, those seven South Africans and 27 others are or have been on the 18 first-class counties’ books this English summer. Some, like Surrey’s Dean Elgar, aren’t here forever. Others, like Yorkshire’s Duanne Olivier, are. Of those 18 clubs, only Nottinghamshire and Warwickshire are untouched by the biltong brigade.
Welcome to the future, cricketminded South Africans. It’s writ large in facts like those, considering the game in our country isn’t in a good way on the field as well as off. There’s no simple way to connect the shambolic men’s World Cup campaign to Cricket South Africa’s failure to stop losing money, but the overall picture isn’t pretty.
Professionalism is leaking out of the game in South Africa, which one of these years will understand — or be made to understand — that its role is to provide players for T20 circuses around the world. Or nurture England’s next generation of internationals until they’re ready to fly north for the rest of their summers.
Journeys like Delport’s, which has taken him to places flung as far from each other as Afghanistan and Barbados, will become commonplace. How South Africa’s teams fare will be of less import than how South Africans fare plying their trade around the globe.
This is something to be accepted without rancour. There’s no point continuing to try to pretend South Africa remain a major player on the world stage. While the national men’s team were competing with the best, and sometimes undeniably were the best, the myth could be sustained. But that time has passed. Reality has caught up with South African cricket, and there’s no denying the truth of a diminished future.
Instead of being, at best, treated as afterthoughts by their compatriots or, at worst, derided as sellouts, players like Delport should be given the credit they have earned for sussing this out long before the rest of us.
They haven’t done things like Hashim Amla or Dale Steyn, but they have done them nonetheless. They’re also South Africans, they’re also cricketers and they also deserve attention.
Because they don’t play in green and gold doesn’t matter.
Bulletproof Truth 