Women win with CSA

“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

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Are we the champions, my friends?

Which Queen song will South African sport remember best from 2019?

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

AND the 2019 African Cup of Nations champions will be … Who cares what the coalition of the always willing, ever ready, mostly able here at Times Select think. Here’s what’s come down from on high in the past few days, apparently.

“God revealed to me that Black Stars would win the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations in June.”

That’s Reindolph Oduro Gyebi, the “General Overseer” of God’s Crown Chapel in Kumasi in Ghana, “Eagle Prophet” to his flock, laying on the fire and brimstone on Adom FM. Of course, there was more …

“I saw rainbow clouding over the Black Stars. I also saw captain Asamoah Gyan and his deputy, Andre Ayew, holding the AFCON trophy and presenting it.”

Gyebi isn’t new to the kopsmokkeling business, having — so he says — foretold disasters, disease and death.

Among his pending predictions are that Nana Akufo-Addo, who became Ghana’s president in January 2017, will serve one term only. In May last year he was adamant Ghana will be rich in two years’ time.

Don’t watch this space. Watch the God’s Crown Chapel Facebook page instead.

In Gyebi’s latest foray into the future he didn’t explain how Gyan and Ayew could help their team win the trophy and then present it to themselves.

Neither did the prophet (peas be upon him) hazard a divined guess at where the tournament will be played since Cameroon have been dumped as the original hosts. The truth got there before he did: Egypt.

Bafana Bafana haven’t lost any of their five AFCON qualifiers but they’ve won only two. Much hangs on their last qualifier, against Libya on March 21. When the teams met at Moses Mabhida in September, it ended goalless. So it’s off to north Africa for the South Africans, who need just a point to make it to the finals.

Sounds doable, but they’re going to a country that put up a merciless dictator for almost 41 years before assassinating him and dragging his corpse through the streets for all to see. They don’t take kak.

So Bafana might have been quietly hopeful that the event did come to their backyard if only to gaurantee their participation.

Happy New Year, sportslovers. So far, so weird. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that 2019 will be big for Mzansi’s big three.

And for football in particular, what with Banyana Banyana’s first trip to the World Cup also on the programme. Desiree Ellis’ squad are pooled with No. 2-ranked Germany, Spain, who are 12th, and, in 15th place, China. South Africa? A distant 48th.

But they have a decent chance of reaching a knockout stage that will feature the four best third-placed sides from the six groups along with the group winners and runners-up.

Getting to the sudden death rounds hasn’t been a problem for South Africa on the cricket field. Not so staying alive when losing means going home.

So you might not want to know this considering what has happened too many times before, but it’s time for another edition of the World Cup. It’s in England, where South Africa suffered their most inglorious exit yet from the tournament at Edgbaston in 1999.

Allan Donald was too shellshocked to run, Lance Klusener was too shellshocked to turn around, the thoroughly shellshocked South Africans shambled for the losers’ exit wondering what the hell had happened, and unshockable Australia marched on from that tied semi-final towards another title.

Might things go differently this year? Probably: there’s not a lot of confidence in South Africa to get anywhere near the semi-finals and that should help keep the pressure off. Also, no team in the world are better led than Faf du Plessis’ side. If he can’t get them over the line no-one can.

Rugby, too, will stage a World Cup this year — in Japan, whose 34-32 win over the Springboks in Brighton at the 2015 event is unarguably the most famous victory, and defeat, in the game’s history.

The Boks spent much of last year playing as if they were trying to convince themselves, and us, that their 1995 and 2007 incarnations did not win the Webb Ellis Cup when we know they did. There was little thunder among the forwards, even less lightning among the backs, and a paucity of ideas all round.

For two-time world champions to win only half their 14 matches in 2018 does not bode well for their chances of adding a third title mere months from now. 

Part of the problem is that Siya Kolisi is too nice. Cricket teams can be captained by committee but not rugby sides, which, like newspapers, have to be dictatorships if they are to win anything worth winning. Perhaps that why Gaddafi banned the game in Libya. He decided it was too violent, on the say-so of one of his sons. We kid you not. Maybe he was nervous of competition.

So rather than trying to bring spread the love liberally in his team by refusing to take credit for successes, Kolisi needs to harden the hell up and lead from the front and not the huddle. He should channel his inner Idi Amin — a 1.93-metre lock forward of decent ability before he turned to killing people for sport — and not wonder what Gandhi would do.      

What might you think, then, of South Africans waking up in a wonderland at around 1pm on Saturday, November 2?

That they must’ve had a hell of a Friday night if they’re stirring only then. Fair enough. But 1pm (SA time) on Saturday, November 2 2019 is more or less when rugby’s World Cup final should end.

And there they are, the Boks, kings of the game for the third time. If Kolisi smiles any wider the top half of his head will fall off.

Cut to the stands, where the gathered Proteas, still pinching themselves about becoming World Cup champions, are dispensing their adulation. So, too, are Banyana Banyana, their tracksuits aglint forever with the star above the badge they earned for triumphing at the World Cup. Also on their feet and cheering are Bafana Bafana, their joy for not only qualifying for the AFCON finals but going to Egypt and winning the damn thing refusing to fade.

Queen’s “We are the champions” is booming around International Stadium Yokohama, just as it did above the celebrating South Africans after the AFCON final in June, at Stade de Lyon on July 7, and at Lord’s on July 19.

It is, of course, way too much to ask. No country in the history of international sport has, nor in all likelihood will, know this feeling.

No-one would write this script because no-one would buy it. Unless, perhaps, it included a thoroughly New South Africa tangent about which came first: the sheep or the beach.

South Africa win all four of the major trophies on offer to their teams in 2019? Nah. Never going to happen. 

If we seriously think so it’s time to reach for the lyrics of another Queen song:

“Is this the real life?

“Is this just fantasy?

“Caught in a landslide, No escape from reality …”

Hang on. Before we put this to bed someone had better give “Prophet Eagle” a call.

Sport in 2018? Mostly meh

Having to put up with Bafana Bafana at the World Cup is like finding your father in a hip bar — a reason to not be cheerful. 

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

A football team who went one win short of glory. A cricket team who went toe-to-toe with the game’s biggest egos. A rugby team who went nowhere.

Sport in South Africa had a two-out-of-three kind of 2018 at a macro level: Mzansi not really for sure, né.

What is for sure is that Bafana Bafana deserve to be disbanded forever Please, South Africans, stop pretending that what is laughably called the men’s national football are anything except an unfunny joke.

They will finish the year in joint 72nd place in the rankings, up from the 78th they were at the start of 2018. But down from the 60th they were last year. They haven’t seen the inside of the top 50 since 2010.

Who else have rolled up at No. 72 here at the arse-end of 2018? Cape Verde, which has a population more than 100 times smaller than South Africa’s, which has exponentially less money to spend on football, which is slowly sinking into an unremarkable splodge of the Atlantic.

Bafana didn’t lose any of the seven games they played this year but that’s as good as it gets. Their only wins were in an irrelevant friendly against Zambia and over the Seychelles in an AFCON qualifier, which is not unlike running rings around a granny and her cat: Zambia are 83rd, the Seychelles 189th.

Stop blaming Stuart Baxter. Or Danny Jordaan. Or the other suits and tracksuits. Or the SABC. The truth is South African men are capable of adding great value to teams in other countries, but put 11 of them together on the same field and ask them to beat 11 blokes from somewhere else and they are rubbish.

South Africans care more about Chiefs or Pirates or Swallows or Patrice Motsepe’s pet project than they do about a team who need to host a tournament before they can be confident of even playing in it.

So let’s be honest about why the World Cup excites us: because the proper sides are playing. Not ours. Having to put up with Bafana at the World Cup is like finding your father in a hip bar — a reason to not be cheerful. 

Banyana Banyana don’t come with that crippling baggage. Not only because they went all the way to penalties in the AFCON final against Nigeria, not only because they have indeed earned the right to go to the World Cup in France next year, not only because are in the top 50 — only just at No. 48 — but also because they play football as it was meant to be played.

Along with all the skill and talent they bring to the pitch, they burn with an irrisistable gees. Joy pervades their performances. They are worth watching win, lose or draw.

It helps that women’s football isn’t yet the domain of obscenely overpaid marketing executives in shorts and boots, which is what the best male players have become. And while it is scandalous that women don’t earn the same amounts — capitalism, that’s on you — there is little doubt that once they do they will be as inhibited and predictable as the men. So enjoy women’s football before that happens.

In particular, marvel at the magic of Thembi Kgatlana. She’s 50 kilogrammes light, 1.56 metres short, 22 years young, wears the No. 11 jersey for both Banyana and the Houston Dash, and lights up the game like a human-powered laser.

Kgatlana was the MVP at last year’s COSAFA Cup, the 2018 Cyprus Cup, and at AFCON, where she was also the top scorer with five goals. She is that good, and she will be for years yet.

The core of South Africa’s cricket team no longer have youth in their kitbags, but that’s a good thing when their opponents are teams like India and Australia. Two more self-regarding sides would be hard to find, and anyone who isn’t Indian or Australian is no doubt thankful that Faf du Plessis’ okes put them in their place in Test series this year. But not without drama.

A self-destructing pitch at the Wanderers almost derailed the match against India, whose captain, Virat Kohli, constantly seemed on the edge of implosion. You couldn’t blow your nose without causing a small war while the Aussies were around. From squabbles in the stairwell at Kingsmead, to savages in the crowd at St George’s Park, to ball-tampering at Newlands, to AB de Villiers and Morné Morkel retiring against a neutered Australian team at the Wanderers, this series had it all.

And more in the shape of some decent cricket. Aiden Markram scored two centuries and there were one each for De Villiers, Dean Elgar, Du Plessis and Cameron Bancroft. Kagiso Rabada survived his shoulder charge on Steve Smith in Port Elizabeth to lead the series with 23 wickets at an average of 19.26.

South Africa won 18 of their 33 matches across the formats and lost the other 15. What the hell: as long as they beat the Indians and the Aussies, who cares.

That’s more than we can say for the Springboks, except for a shining day in Wellington when they claimed their first win over the All Blacks in New Zealand since 2009. Aphiwe Dyantyi scored two tries that day, and lit up most of the other moments he was on the field in 2018 as South Africa’s most watchable player.

The Boks won half of their 14 games in 2018; not nearly good enough for team who have twice won the World Cup. Neither will it escape notice that they conceded only two fewer points than they scored this year.

Too often they played like a team trying, and failing, to remember how good they used to be. For every step they took forward — and Rassie Erasmus engineered a good few — there were two-and-a-half backward.

How to sum up big sport in South Africa in 2018? Meh.