“We do not believe that the evidence suggests that he would have consciously appointed someone who he thought was not the best person for the job because of their race.” – the arbitrators on Graeme Smith’s choice of Mark Boucher as head coach.
Telford Vice | Cape Town
GRAEME Smith is frustrated. England’s untroubled batters untroubled are nudging, nurdling and occasionally nailing South Africa’s pace attack to all parts of Kingsmead. Smith knows what needs to happen, but he can’t make it happen.
A television commentator between stints behind the microphone, he is standing at the top of a flight of stairs outside the press box. And fuming about what he can and can’t see on the field. When another four streaks through the slips, the ball rushing to Smith’s end of the ground, Dean Elgar turns and jogs to do the fetching. Smith sticks out his chin and stands taller and broader to try and catch Elgar’s eye as he runs towards him.
He does. With a motion that betrays the urgency of his annoyance, Smith rips his empty right hand through the motions of an imaginary off-break. Get a bloody spinner on! Elgar nods in agreement, but turns his palms upwards, tilts his head sideways in resignation, grimaces and shrugs. Dude, I’m not the captain. Neither are you.
It’s December 2015: almost two years after Smith’s abrupt retirement, which was announced during the Newlands Test against Australia in March 2014. Letting go is difficult when you’ve captained a Test team more times and won more matches — 109 and 53 — than anyone in cricket history, and walked away from it all, for reasons that had nothing to do with cricket, a month after your 33rd birthday.
So the fact that, eight years on, Smith has no formal connection to the game in his country should come as a shock. Especially as it didn’t have to be this way. From December 2019 to March this year, he was CSA’s director of cricket and instrumental in the resurrection that was required in the wake of chronic maladministration. Insiders talk with awe about the brutally long hours he put in to secure India’s tour last summer, which pumped millions into CSA’s coffers. But he has declined to continue the relationship, and within hours of the announcement of him being cleared on all charges in the arbitration proceedings CSA had brought against him he was on his way to India to commentate on the IPL. How did we get here?
The Social Justice and Nation-Building (SJN) project was created by CSA’s previous board, a dysfunctional rabble led by Chris Nenzani who were ushered off the gravy train with government help in November 2019. Notwithstanding those dubious credentials, the SJN hearings exposed much about what was and continues to be wrong about South African cricket’s relationship with race and racism. The testimony there was and is vital in this ongoing conversation. But the report that resulted belongs in the bin along with that sorry era. It was an insult to the witnesses and a half-baked hodgepodge of allegations, untested assertions and potentially damaging conclusions. It’s 235 pages are worth exponentially less than the USD463,000 CSA spent on the SJN.
We can add as much as another USD127,000 to the bill. That’s how much, it is estimated, CSA could be ordered to pay in legal fees for Smith’s arbitration. In a 95-page award that was released by CSA on Monday, independent arbitrators Ngwako Maenetje and Michael Bishop — both of them advocates — Smith was found not guilty on all charges. The accusations were that, as captain, he was motivated by race to push for the white AB de Villiers to be picked ahead of the black Thami Tsolekile, and that, as director of cricket, race made him favour the white Mark Boucher over the black Enoch Nkwe as South Africa’s head coach. It was also allegedly race that made Smith, who is white, unwilling to report to the black Thabang Moroe when the latter was CSA’s chief executive. That, too, was rejected by the arbitrators, with costs — a figure that has yet to be agreed. All of the charges arose from findings made in the SJN report, which surely must now face being discredited.
Until Boucher’s playing career was ended by injury in July 2012 on the first day of South Africa’s tour to England, Tsolekile had seemed on course to replace him as Test wicketkeeper. Indeed, Tsolekile had been told he was likely to play in the home series against New Zealand in January 2013. But Tsolekile was not part of the squad in England, where AB de Villiers was, officially, Boucher’s back-up. Boucher’s injury meant De Villiers, logically, inherited the gloves. Tsolekile subsequently travelled to England as De Villiers’ understudy.
The arbitrators found that Smith, far from acting in a racist manner to keep Tsolekile out of the side, argued in favour of the inclusion of JP Duminy, who is brown, to fill the vacancy left by Boucher in the XI. That would lengthen and thus strengthen South Africa’s batting. In arbitrator-speak, there was a “non-race-based reason — a cricketing reason — not to select Mr Tsolekile”.
Tsolekile was a victim of the success of that thinking. South Africa won in England, becoming the No. 1-ranked Test team in the process, and kept the team who did so intact as far as possible. That meant Tsolekile didn’t play against New Zealand, nor did he ever add to the three Test caps he won in India in 2004. He was indeed hard done by in terms of his international career, but not by Smith on racial grounds. Also, while Smith’s input on selection was sought, he had no authority about who should play.
The Nenzani board appointed Smith and gave him carte blanche about signing South Africa’s coaching staff. Smith’s appointment, initially for three months, was revealed by CSA on December 11 2019. Three days later, Boucher was confirmed as coach with Nkwe as his assistant. The positions were not advertised. Why the rush? The first Test against England loomed on December 26. Smith did not go against the terms of his contract with CSA in doing things this way, but that didn’t make it right. The arbitrators make the point that “the manner in which these appointments were made was clearly undesirable”, and that there were “certainly flaws in the way that Mr Boucher was appointed”. But — and this is what matters — “they do not establish unfair racial discrimination by Mr Smith against Mr Nkwe”. Smith “honestly wanted the Proteas to succeed and honestly believed that Mr Boucher was most likely to achieve that”. Here’s the clincher: “We do not believe that the evidence suggests that he would have consciously appointed someone who he thought was not the best person for the job because of their race.”
The claim that Smith didn’t want to report to Moroe because he is black is frivolous nonsense. No-one who valued their integrity and wanted to do their job properly would choose to report to a chief executive who wrecked almost everything he touched administratively and was duly fired for gross misconduct in August 2020. Smith was appointed by a majority black and brown board, served another black and brown majority board, and reported to a black or brown chief executive for most of his tenure. Smith called one of them, Pholetsi Moseki, as a witness at his arbitration hearings.
In a statement on Monday, Smith was quoted as saying: “I’m grateful that my name has finally been cleared. I’ve always given South African cricket my utmost, as a player, captain and administrator, over the last 20 years. So, to hear these baseless allegations of racism being made has been extremely difficult, both for me and my family. It has been exhausting and distracting, not least because South African cricket has also been going through a well-publicised rebuilding process which has required a lot of attention. I’m just pleased that we have now gone through a robust arbitration process before independent, objective arbitrators and I have been completely vindicated.”
In the same statement, David Becker, Smith’s attorney, slated “a multitude of opportunistic claims and insinuations made before the SJN which were not properly tested and were clearly false”. Becker blamed “a small group of disgruntled individuals with an obvious agenda to tarnish his good name and have him removed as the director of cricket”. He spoke of “vexatious claims and insinuations [that] were serious and defamatory” and said “Graeme has every right to feel aggrieved by these personal attacks”. Whether Smith would sue was not made clear.
None of which should suggest that Smith is a benign figure in this saga. He was born into a level of privilege that put him, from the beginning of his life, far further down the road towards success than most South Africans. Race was unquestionably the determining factor in giving him that unfair advantage. That is not his fault and it does not make him racist, but it does mean he has benefited from racism. Some in cricket who have worked with Smith — other whites, it should be said — consider him an elitist who is oblivious to what average South Africans go through daily. Again, that does not make him racist.
There should be empathy in all this for CSA’s current board, which has been in office since June last year. They inherited the SJN report, along with its faulty findings, and couldn’t very well ignore it. Instead they took the best option available and put it to an independent test, which it has failed dismally. That the same document will be central to Boucher’s disciplinary hearing in May is at once cause for alarm and a relief for his lawyers: if the report has been shown to be untrustworthy once, why not again?
But that is a different set of facts for a different day. While CSA are scrambling to find sponsors, stability and Smith’s replacement, he is on his way to the IPL, and probably not in economy class. Whether Smith is racist or not; a hard-working, skilled administrator or nothing more than a well-connected rich guy is, largely, a matter of opinion. Here’s the fact that matters today: South African cricket needs him infinitely more than he needs South African cricket. Not for the first time, Smith knows what needs to happen. But he can’t make it happen.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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