“Paarl Rocks! Paarl Rocks! Paarl Rocks!…” – the passion burns brightly in the Boland.
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
IT delivered cricket worth watching, and a lot more. The Mzansi Super League (MSL) took the edge off South Africa’s 3-0 thrashing in a men’s Test series in India in October, and even helped the cricket-minded sections of the country think about something other than how badly the game is being run – into the ground, many would say – by Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) tragicomically inept board. It is no small feat that Russell Adams, CSA’s head of events, and his small army of committed, hard-working zealots made the tournament happen as well as they did despite everything that is wrong with cricket in South Africa.
So it is indeed a pity, then, that we may never see another ball bowled in the tournament. CSA should by now have been paid at least part of the R71-million owed them by Global Sports Commerce (GSC), who held the MSL bundle rights and sold them on. The money has been asked for repeatedly, but the closest CSA have come to getting it is the promise of a meeting on January 28. Cricbuzz have twice sought an explanation from Neekunj Todi, of GSC subsidiary ITW Consultants, who are dealing with CSA on the issue, asking why the money hasn’t been paid and what arrangements are being made to do so. He has not replied.
CSA do not have confidence GSC will cough up. That’s hardly surprising considering Sportsgateway, another GSC subsidiary, are facing an insolvency petition filed in India by FidelisWorld Group for failing to settle a US$4-million arbitration award over a breach of contract in their acquisition of Wisden India.
GSC got an awful lot more bang for their MSL buck than R71-million should have bought them, an indication of the shoddiness of the deal struck by Thabang Moroe, CSA’s now suspended chief executive. The economics of the game in South Africa are cockeyed further by CSA having to pay interim appointees as well as the seven permanent staff who have been suspended. Moroe, for instance, is understood to be on a monthly salary of R350 000, before bonuses, and an annual package of about R5.3-million.
Once production costs are paid, only R40-million of GSM’s cash would go into CSA’s coffers, but the absence of that money would push the MSL’s total losses past R150-million. And that would be damaging enough to prompt CSA to scrap the tournament.
There’s a fan in Paarl who was as happy a human being could safely be when the Rocks beat the Nelson Mandela Bay Giants on December 8, and who would have been happier still, no doubt unsafely, when his team won the final against the Tshwane Spartans on Monday. By the look of him, he didn’t have much in life besides that happiness. How do you tell him it’s gone and not coming back?
He must have been 140 years old. His dreadlocks were as grey as he was gnarled. His once boldly maroon West Indies shirt had faded to watermelon pink, its collar attached by a few threads. His slight, boney frame had all but been swallowed by the bulk of his wheelchair. And there was no escaping him.
“Paarl Rocks! Paarl Rocks! Paarl Rocks!…” His chants were fuelled by mighty shoves of his hands on the wheels of his chair, powering him forward at impressive speed. A collision was unavoidable. Would it be a full frontal clatter of metal on limbs? A knee knackered by a wheel hub? An armrest into the groin?
Happily, he had the skills to melt the moment into a high five, extending a vast hand whose leatheriness told of a life lived hard. That hand’s warmth was beautiful. With that he was gone, onward and upward and through the gaps between the thousands around him also celebrating victory, dispensing vast, leathery, warm, beautiful high fives as he went.
“Paarl Rocks! Paarl Rocks! Paarl Rocks!…”
The Rocks had scrapped their way to a 12-run win that sealed a home final and sent the Giants home to play in the eliminator against the Spartans. It was the drama that started with Faf du Plessis, the Rocks’ captain, talking about his XI at the toss: “One change. Hardus Viljoen is not playing today because he’s lying in bed with my sister [Remi Rhynners]; they got married yesterday.” It ended in a verbal altercation between players from opposing teams on the balcony that needed the intervention of cooler heads to stop the silliness from turning physical.
Clearly, players and public alike have come to care about the MSL. This year’s tournament began in front of only 2 800 spectators at the Wanderers on November 8, even though Kagiso Rabada, Chris Gayle and Quinton de Kock were in action, and took 10 games – three of them among the total of eight washouts – to draw a crowd of 5 000. It reached its climax with the approving roars of 7 500 delirious Rocks supporters who had come not to see the Spartans’ AB de Villiers but to cheer their team to the tree tops. There would have been exponentially more at the final, but that’s as many as Paarl’s picturesque but pintsized ground can hold.
“If the cricket world didn’t know of the Boland community from the Western Cape before, then they certainly do now with their enthusiastic support throughout this tournament,” Adams was quoted as saying in a justifiably rah-rah release.
The past few weeks have sparkled with snapshots like Tabraiz Shamsi conjuring magic tricks on the field in the afterglow of producing magical deliveries, Ben Dunk — can there be a more Australian name? — talking faster than he scored in his 54-ball 99 not out against the Spartans, and ancients like Dale Steyn and Imran Tahir bowling back the years.
The first tournament had been uncertainly received, like a second-hand car that doesn’t drive as well as it gleamed in the showroom. Just a year later fans own their teams like heirlooms to be passed on; particularly in Paarl and Port Elizabeth, which is part of Nelson Mandela Bay. The MSL shouldn’t exist considering its mounting losses, but it has become that elusive thing essential to its survival and, eventually, its prosperity: real.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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