“Would you think cricket is in a really good position now? Or was it better before? Whatever they’ve done in the franchise era, it’s been a giant failure.” – Wendell Bossenger
Telford Vice | Cape Town
OTHER than a flat, straight road that stretches across the belly of South Africa for 165 kilometres, nothing separates Kimberley from Bloemfontein. The earthy people, the welcoming atmosphere, the dusty air in these two places is the same. That, at least, is the outsider’s view. Locals couldn’t disagree more.
Kimberley’s heart is a hole that was dug, using only picks and shovels, 240 metres deep by 50,000 miners. They found 2,720 kilogrammes of diamonds from 1871 to 1914. Naval Hill towers incongruously — we are deep inland — over Bloemfontein. It is so named because it was where British naval guns were stationed during the Anglo-Boer War at the turn of the 19th century.
Arch-colonist Cecil John Rhodes would stop at the Halfway House in Kimberley on his ride between diamond mines and slake his thirst while still mounted on his horse. At the Mystic Boer in Bloemfontein, tops were popped off beer bottles by an expertly handled large knife, everyone smoked, including non-smokers, the pool tables were occupied by people who discovered this was the only place in the world where they were any good at the game — but only at 4am — and from backlit photographs on the walls long-dead Boer guerrillas peered down on the scene with baleful disapproval.
“The Half” has been there since 1872. It still is, old and improved without glorified land thieves and their horses. “Mystic”, established in 1997, became a Covid casualty last year. The people of Kimberley wouldn’t say so out loud, but they will see that difference as proof of their city’s superiority over Bloemfontein, which has long rolled its eyes at its smalltown neighbour 165 kilometres down the highway.
It seems all of this went over CSA’s heads when it decided, in 2003, that the cricket unions of Griqualand West and Orange Free State — the areas centred on Kimberley and Bloemfontein – would join forces to form a franchise based in Bloem. Griquas were grumpy enough to resort to legal action, which they lost. That was the most dramatic of the birthing challenges that marked South Africa’s move from 11 provincial teams to six franchises in the summer 2004-05.
But it’s not as if the team originally called the Eagles — now the Knights — were the only imperfect partnership. East London and Gqeberha, the new name for Port Elizabeth, are 285 kilometres apart along the east coast. But, in cricket culture terms, Border and Eastern Province are from different worlds. So the Warriors have never quite clicked across provincial lines. Neither have the Cobras — a gnu of Western Province, Boland and South Western Districts — the Titans, where Northerns and Easterns are supposed to get along just fine, nor the Lions, a cobbling of Gauteng and North West.
In each of those instances economically stronger provinces swallowed smaller siblings, who had to grin and bear the truth that the other guys didn’t think they belonged in their shared, passionless dressingroom; that they were there because the suits said they had to be. To the public, fake teams with made-up names that had no history to lean on were about as attractive as being stuck in traffic. Crowds at provincial matches started thinning once South Africa returned to international competition in 1991, but at franchise games they became thinner than cattle in a drought, which led CSA to throw open the gates at first-class games. All that did was confirm what was widely suspected: not only could you not convince people to pay to watch this kind of cricket, you couldn’t give it away for free. Even the cricketing gods have given up on the stuff — the first-class final between the Dolphins and the Titans at Kingsmead, the last franchise match that will be played, has seen only 10 overs bowled in two days because of the weather.
Provincial cricket has continued to exist and has even retained first-class status, but it is scoffed at as a sad relic of an outmoded past. Not for much longer. From next season the franchises will be gone and the provinces will again offer South Africa’s highest level of the domestic game. Why? Because more players need more opportunities in more teams, say the suits. A bidding process has decided which eight teams will be in the top division and which of the other seven will fight for the single promotion spot when that part of the system is activated in 2023-24. Partly, this has always been about money. The creation of the franchises drove the provinces into the amateur ranks, which shrank the coterie of professional players. When the franchises go out of business there will be 75 fewer player contracts on offer.
The cricketing logic that drove 11 provinces into six franchises was that it would mean only the best players emerged, that there would be no room for mediocrity. And that would make South Africa stronger in the international arena. The decision was taken in the wake of Australia winning five of their six Tests against South Africa in home-and-away series in 2001-02. All of Australia’s international players are drawn from six state sides. If it works for the Aussies it will work for us, was the thinking. Did it?
“Would you think cricket is in a really good position now? Or was it better before? That will answer everything. If I look at franchise cricket now and the players who are around, and where we are ranked in the world, and how good we really are compared to when the provincial system stopped, it’s not much of a comparison. Whatever they’ve done in the franchise era, with all their performance chains and systems, it’s been a giant failure.”
That’s Wendell Bossenger, whose name you might not know if you aren’t familiar with the snakes ’n ladders of South African domestic cricket. Bossenger’s senior career lasted from October 1996 to February 2011. He was a silkily skilled wicketkeeper, a versatile batter and a capable captain; an allround model professional and an asset to any team. But his team were Griquas. With vacancies for ’keeper-batters limited to one per team, and with the number of top teams reduced from 11 to six from 2004-05, leaving Griquas out in the cold, Bossenger was denied his shot at leaving a legacy that could easily have included an international career. Instead he kept labouring in relative obscurity, surfacing in two first-class games for the Eagles in 2006-07. He was part of CSA coaching structures, has worked with the Titans on a part-time basis, and is now based in George as a sales representative for a sporting goods company. “I’ve been a house husband for three years — Covid got me out of retirement,” he said.
After the 2003-04 season, when the provinces were shoved aside, South Africa were second in the Test and ODI rankings. They are now sixth in Tests and T20Is and fifth in the ODI standings. But what of South Africa’s rise to No. 1 in the Test rankings in August 2012, a place they held until January 2016 but for an interruption of three months by Australia?
“You can’t say players like [Graeme] Smith, [Jacques] Kallis and [Mark] Boucher came from the franchises,” Bossenger said. “That’s the old system. They managed to make [franchise cricket] look good, and once they faded away we were left with six teams where no-one’s really playing good cricket anymore.”
All of the players who featured in the 2-0 series win in England in August 2012, which put South Africa on top of the Test rankings, made their first-class debuts before the franchise era. The closest to the cusp were AB de Villiers, Vernon Philander, Morné Morkel and Dale Steyn, who all came up in 2003-04 — the last summer the provinces represented the big time. For those of Bossenger’s view, that was also the last summer South African cricket was of a high enough quality to allow players to step up into the international arena confident that they could handle what was coming their way.
“Shouldn’t we look to 11 teams to create as much depth as we possibly can in every position in every province? Yes, we would have a couple of really strong provinces. But, in general, we would have a lot of feeder provinces playing against each other. I played for Griquas, and my statistics were better than a lot of the guys who played in major provinces. So when I played against a big union I wasn’t out of my depth. Now I don’t think we have even enough guys to put a proper Test team together. It is disappointing watching now, having been part of an era where the standard was really good, which was built on an era before that when we had really strong teams. And we just said to them, ‘Half of you guys are not allowed to play [top level] cricket anymore. Go away and do something else.’”
Following the Australian template had “led us down a very bad path. We’re a completely different nation and mix of cultures. We need to get back to who we really are as a nation; our own DNA and identity. That’s really important. We don’t want to just hope we’re good. We want to know it.” Putting the provinces first again was “definitely the right way to go. Hopefully we can get the right framework for this thing to work again. I do believe there are still very clever people out there who can make it work, and we have a lot of good cricketers of all races and some good coaches who are really passionate about the game and work hard. You need to rebuild the system with that.”
Neil McKenzie, who began his first-class career for what would now be called Gauteng’s B team in January 1995 and ended it in the colours of the Lions in March 2015, concurs with some of Bossenger’s sentiments: “The provincial sides were highly competitive. South Africa’s international players were playing week in and week out. In terms of strength, our cricket was at its toughest then. The bowlers really came at you. When I first played Natal had Malcolm Marshall, Shaun Pollock, Lance Klusener, Ross Veenstra … At EP it was Brett Schultz and Eldine Baptiste. Northerns had Fanie de Villiers and Tertius Bosch, and they were considered a more beatable side; more a one-day team. You had to know your story playing against those attacks.”
Even so, McKenzie says the franchise era has given South Africa “good, proper cricket”. But he feels it was undermined by the subsequent exponential increase in the players’ commitments: “The IPL and the other T20 leagues weren’t around [before the franchises] and there wasn’t as much international cricket. You weren’t losing the big names. And the more world class players you’ve got in the system, they help more than any of the coaches. A guy batting with Hashim Amla, Graeme Smith or Jacques Kallis is going to learn more from one innings than he would from 10 net sessions.”
The IPL has coincided with South Africa’s summer only three times in its 13 editions, and even then only partially. But there are plenty of other T20 leagues that could get in the way of the national cause. South Africa played 427 matches from their return from isolation in November 1991 to the end of major provincial cricket. In the equivalent time after the advent of the franchises they played 474. In less than the past 13 years they’ve played 482. So the bigger the star the less they will be in action in domestic cricket, whatever its shape.
That’s nothing new. Kagiso Rabada played 26 matches last year: nine for South Africa and the other 17 for the Delhi Capitals. That he has appeared seven times for the Lions in 2021 has as much to do with the pandemic — a visit by Australia was called off — as CSA planning. McKenzie’s memory of the South Africa spearhead’s most recent match, against the Titans at the Wanderers last week, was vivid: “You had Rabada running in against [Aiden] Markram and [Dean] Elgar. That’s what you want.”
It is. But you can’t always get what you want. Kimberley has a hole. Bloemfontein has a hill. There’s no changing that, come old fashioned hotels, dodgy bars, provinces or franchises.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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