“The virus is so changing that we cannot predict what will happen. If things suddenly take a turn for the worse and the experts say we can’t do it, we won’t be able to.” – Zak Yacoob, CSA’s interim board chair, on the chances of Australia’s tour going ahead.
Telford Vice | Cape Town
WEAR a mask. Maintain social distancing. Don’t drive drunk. South Africans have heard it all before. But not from a cricket administrator telling them how to do their bit to keep Australia’s tour on track despite the coronavirus pandemic.
England abandoned their white-ball tour in December with half their six matches unplayed because of positive tests within the squads’ bio-secure environment. But no cases of the virus were detected in the bubble before and during Sri Lanka’s two Tests in the country in December and January. Where did that leave the visit by the Australians, who are due to play three Tests in South Africa in April?
“I had a chat with the chair of CA [Earl Eddings] about a week ago, and we agreed that the tour is going to go ahead,” Zak Yacoob, who chairs CSA’s interim board, told an online press conference on Thursday. “We agreed that we are going to try and ensure that we are going to make sure our facilities are as good possible; as good as necessary. We agreed that we learn every day, but that is not on the basis that we did anything wrong when England was here, of course. Because you know that none of the England people were affected. That’s the bottom line.”
Two positive tests in the England camp were subsequently declared false. A common South African view of why that tour failed revolves around England listing as a condition of their agreement to play the series in South Africa that they be allowed to leave the squads’ shared hotel to play golf. CSA acquiesced, and the visitors embraced that privilege enthusiastically by taking to five different golf courses spread between 13 and 72 kilometres from their hotel on eight of the 24 days they were in the country. It seems the lesson landed firmly with CSA — all involved were confined to the hotel for the Sri Lanka series — and will influence arrangements for Australia’s tour.
“The learning in relation to this virus changes all the time, and as it changes things must change,” Yacoob said. “We agreed that as professionals neither [Eddings] nor I know anything about this. So we rely on professionals. We have doctors, virology experts, isolation experts, and so on, who lead us through this process. We have adopted the approach that as long as the experts on both sides, true professionals in relation to corona and health, agree that the facilities are fine, we go ahead on the basis that the facilities are fine. So far there is, between the chair of CA and myself, no doubt that the [tour] will go ahead.”
Pholetsi Moseki, CSA’s acting chief executive, was confident the venture would get the green light: “The details will be finalised and announced to the media in a week or so.”
But Yacoob’s assurance was necessarily conditional: “We have agreed, also, that the coronavirus is so changing that we cannot predict what will happen. So if things suddenly take a turn for the worse and the experts say we can’t do it, we won’t be able to. We have to pray that things don’t get so bad.”
Which is where cricketminded South Africans come in: “The cricket supporters in our country must know that when they’re complying with distance and masking and so on, they’re doing it not only in their own interests. They’re doing it in the interests of cricket. And if they don’t mask, don’t keep distance, and they don’t stop driving drunk, and all that sort of thing, each of them by their contribution to expanding the virus will be making some contribution to the stopping of cricket and a whole range of other things.”
Keeping international cricket going in the time of Covid-19 wasn’t CSA’s only ongoing challenge. “The most important thing for the interim board now is to go into the brass tacks of how to change the structure of CSA in order to ensure that it works better,” Yacoob said. The members council — comprised of provincial affiliate presidents — and not the board is CSA’s highest authority. To muddy the waters of authority still more, most of the seats on the board are reserved for members council suits.
“You cannot have two centres of power in one organisation,” Yacoob said. “Our preference at the moment is for the board to be the centre of power in relation to day-to-day operational matters. We should make absolutely certain that the majority of the members of the future board are independent.”
That would bring CSA into line with the recommendations of the Nicholson report, which the organisation has avoided implementing fully since 2012. But there was a catch, as Yacoob explained: “According to [CSA’s] memorandum of incorporation [MOI] as it currently is, only the members council can change [the MOI]. If the members council refuses to agree to the change there may be some trouble and things could take a longer time.”
The members council presided over the financial corruption in CSA’s professional arm in 2009 that led to the Nicholson investigation. The buck for the financial and governance calamities that have engulfed CSA since 2017 also stops with the members council. Even so, Yacoob expected it to do the right thing this time: “I have no doubt that the members council is not going to come to the negotiations with any ulterior purpose. I think they will come in genuinely and we will have a bona fide debate. But the complication is that an independent board does in a sense result in a reduction of the powers of the members council in some ways.”
The interim board was established in November with the help of Nathi Mthethwa, South Africa’s sports minister. Its term was to have expired on January 15 but has been extended by a month. Yacoob said the board might seek more time to complete its work. But, just as it was up to the members council to appoint the interim board — which it refused to do initially — so it will be the members council’s decision whether the structure survives beyond February 15. “If the members council does not approve the extension, unless something happens or the minister does something, or unless there is some agreement, out we go,” Yacoob said. “So we really are at the mercy of the members council and we don’t know what they are going to decide.”
As if that wasn’t enough to keep the interim board busy, it is being taken to court by Omphile Ramela for removing him from as a member. Xolani Vonya, who had been recused from the board, has been accepted back into the fold. Kugandrie Govender, CSA’s former acting chief executive, and Welsh Gwaza, the company secretary, have been suspended pending disciplinary hearings. And there’s a new domestic structure to consider. Where will the money to pay for it come from, and how will the consequent disappearance of more than a quarter of professional players’ contracts be handled?
If South Africa’s current lockdown restrictions didn’t prohibit the sale of alcohol, that might have been enough to drive the interim board to drink. Or just to drink: no drunk driving, remember.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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