“How I wish others are listening as we speak now.” – Zizi Kodwa, South Africa’s sports minister, laments other codes’ failure to professionalise women’s sport.
Telford Vice / Cape Town
CRICKET went has gone where no other sport in South Africa has. Not only will women’s international players earn the same match fees as their male counterparts, the women’s domestic leagues will be professional. That will make CSA the only national board besides NZC and the BCCI to offer pay parity on game days, while CA’s basic contract is the same for men and women.
The changes will be implemented from South Africa’s ODI and T20I series against Pakistan in Karachi, which start on September 1, and the league is on the cards for the coming 2023/24 season. The measures will add the equivalent of USD2.13-million to CSA’s bills over the next three years, USD799,000 of which will be paid by government.
The top division of six of the 16 current women’s provincial teams will form the professional league, which will feature competitions in both white-ball formats that will carry prizemoney for the winners. The teams — the Lions, the Titans, Western Province, the Dolphins, Free State and the Garden Route Badgers — will be able to contract 11 players each, up from the current six. Salaries will be equal to the best paid players in the second division of the men’s game. Each team will be served by a head and an assistant coach, a physiotherapist and a strength and conditioning specialist. At least half of the support staff will be women.
No other team sport in South Africa will offer the levels of equality to women that cricket has promised. Indeed, none of the country’s other team sports boast a professional competition. Those facts were not lost on sports minister Zizi Kodwa.
“What we are celebrating today is not about monetary value but about leadership and political will,” Kodwa said at the league’s launch in Tshwane, formerly Pretoria, on Tuesday. “When I came [into the ministry] in March I heard about other federations, as far back as 2018, to which the department made commitments of millions for professionalising women’s sport. To date that has not been realised.
“The time for long statements and endless talk and promises must end. In the first week of our appointment we met with the top five federations in the country, and we stressed this point. [CSA] seem to be the only federation who understood what we said.
“I asked earlier whether it was deliberate or an omission not to invite other federations for this occasion, because I think they could learn a thing or two. How I wish others are listening as we speak now.”
The football suits, in particular. South Africa’s first-choice national women’s team refused to play Botswana in a friendly on July 2 because, they said, the field at the venue the South African Football Association (Safa) had allocated for the match, a veritable cabbage patch of clay and clumps of grass 50 kilometres outside Johannesburg, was dangerous. The players feared the conditions could lead to injuries, and that with the World Cup looming in Australia and New Zealand. They were also unhappy that they would not earn any money from Safa for playing in the tournament. Things went better on the field, where the South Africans became the only team from their country — male or female — to reach the last 16 of a football World Cup.
“We do not wish to see any federation go through what Banyana Banyana [the national women’s football team’s nickname] went through,” Kodwa said.
Tuesday’s news kept South African sport’s focus squarely on women. Suné Luus’ team reached the final of the T20 World Cup, which South Africa hosted in February. The netball World Cup was played in Cape Town in July and August, and while the home side finished sixth — they were runners-up in 1995 — and the event was marred by organisational issues, the team were passionately supported. There was warm appreciation, too, for the football side’s efforts in their World Cup, which ended on Sunday.
That cricket has been the only code to recognise the development of the women’s game and put its money where its mouth is should be commended. CSA get a lot wrong, but not everything.
Cricbuzz
Bulletproof Truth 