Graeme Smith – Bulletproof Truth

Brace for SA20 impact players?

“It’s a terrible rule.” – Jacques Kallis

Telford Vice / Cape Town

THE impact player rule jolting the IPL could be implemented in next year’s SA20. Cricbuzz understands the measure will be on the agenda when the South African tournament’s administrators gather to plan the 2025 edition.

That meeting will be held after the ICC releases their updated playing conditions, which are usually published on October 1. If the rule is approved, the SA20 will be ripe for the kind of revolution being seen in the IPL.

Should such a change seem unlikely, consider that the SA20 discussed introducing the rule last year. It was decided not to follow the IPL’s example partly because the SA20 player auction had happened by then and the franchises had not been able to shape their squads with impact players in mind. Concerns over the adverse consequences for allrounders, who are earning fewer opportunities because of the rule, and player development also helped make up minds. Those opposed, whose ranks include several prominent players, will hope that thinking prevails.

Among them is Jacques Kallis, who told Cricbuzz: “It’s a terrible rule. You’re negating the allrounder, and I don’t think that’s good for cricket. Especially for India, who are trying to grow their allrounders. As an allrounder, I don’t want to see that. You want them to play a major role.

“Also, there’s a very small chance of being bowled out because you’re basically playing with eight batters. That makes a big difference, and that’s why the scores have gone crazy. Yes, the batters have taken the game to the next level, but I definitely don’t agree that there should be an impact player.”

Kallis did see an upside to the rule for players who couldn’t quite crack the XI: “If your team is doing well your side doesn’t change much. Then guys sit on the sidelines and do nothing. So they could get gametime as impact players. That’s probably the only bonus, but it’s still not good for the game.”

Happily for Kallis and those who concur, he is on good terms with SA20 commissioner Graeme Smith — who has not responded to enquiries about the possibility of impact players being green lit for next year’s tournament. “I have had a chat with Graeme about this, and from what I understand they’re not going to do it,” Kallis said.

But the ongoing rule-fuelled explosion of runs in India, and the fact that all six of the SA20 franchises are IPL-owned, could prompt a rethink in South Africa when the bigwigs meet.

The tournament already has a semblance of a substitution system in place, with captains nominating at the toss which two of the 13 players’ names on their team sheets will sit out. In the IPL, five replacements are designated before the match — one of whom can be deployed during any natural break at any stage of the game.

The benefit of the SA20’s current approach is limited to allowing teams to finalise their XIs after analysing the actual conditions, not estimating what they might be based on experience. The benefits of the impact player rule for IPL teams, particularly in batting terms, seem unlimited.

Measured until after Tuesday’s game between Delhi Capitals and Rajasthan Royals, the 1,014th played in all IPLs, 11 of the tournament’s all-time top 20 highest totals have been seen this year along with 10 of the 20 biggest match aggregates and four of the highest 20 successful run chases. Teams have been bowled out for fewer than 100 in 40 IPL innings, but only once this year.

The record of a dozen centuries for a single edition of the IPL — five more than in 2016 and 2022, which are second on the list — was set last year, the first time impact players were deployed. Suryakumar Yadav’s undefeated 102 off 51 balls for Mumbai Indians against Sunrisers Hyderabad at the Wankhede on Monday was already the 12th ton this year, and that with 19 games left in the competition at that stage.

Five of last year’s hundreds were scored by players who were then subbed out of the line-up, all of them in the top four. That has been true once this year, when Travis Head opened and made 102 off 41 for Sunrisers Hyderabad against Royal Challengers Bangalore at the Chinnaswamy on April 15. It happened the other way around a day later at Eden Gardens, where Sanju Samson chose to field first and Jos Buttler scored 107 not out off 60 against Kolkata Knight Riders after being parachuted into Rajasthan Royals’ opening partnership.

Sai Sudharsan was the highest impact runscorer after 56 games, making 325 runs — including both of his half-centuries and all five of his top scores — at a strike rate of 129.48 in eight innings as a substitute. He made 33, 31 and 35 in his other innings, but at a higher strike rate of 139.44.

The best impact strike rate after 56 games, among players who had scored at least 50 runs, belonged to Royal Challengers Bangalore’s Mahipal Lomror — 238.10. Overall, batters who were subbed out had a strike rate of 162.12. Those who came into the XI scored at 143.67.

Arshdeep Singh was the most successful impact bowler with 13 wickets and Mustafizur Rahman’s economy rate of 6.38 was the best among those who had sent down five or more overs. Subbed out bowlers have taken 70 wickets, and their economy rate was 9.85. Those coming in have claimed 36 wickets and conceded 11.13 runs an over.

But it’s batting where this buck stops, or has refused to stop. The real effect of the rule is that it has removed from the non-impact batters’ minds much of the fear of getting out. They no longer need to curb their enthusiasm. Whoever the impact player is and however many runs they might make matters less than the invigorating fact of their presence. That gives their teammates licence to lash out more lustily than ever. Hence we’ve seen exponentially more IPL centuries than ever in 2023 and 2024.

We saw four centuries in the SA20 this year — up by one from the inaugural edition — and 454 sixes; 77 more than in 2023. On Thursday the tournament reported a 21% increase in global broadcaster viewership and 75-million digital views. That’s a fraction of the interest in the IPL, which garnered 111-million streaming viewers for this year’s opening match alone.

But the SA20 is far from broken. So why try to fix it with an impact player rule. Besides, South Africa’s outfields are significantly bigger than India’s, and the pitches not as flat. That an IPL record low of two centuries were scored when the tournament was played in South Africa in 2009 — four fewer than in 2008 — seems instructive.

That, of course, was long before impact players. The toothpaste is out of the tube. Good luck getting it back inside.

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South Africa’s selection sickness

“Players need to be able to trust the system. Irrespective of their race, creed or colour, they want a fair opportunity. They want to know that they’re backed and valued in the system. But there are so many shortcomings.” – Rihan Richards, CSA president

Telford Vice / Cape Town

THE system. Suddenly South Africa’s cricketminded are woke to the flaws in the game’s design to deliver particular players to the international arena. Not that there is much new about that. What is new is the focus on the s-word.

This sharpened last Tuesday, when Rob Walter said, “My number one imperative is to create a winning Proteas team. In order to do that, every time I pick a side I’ve got to pick the best team at the time that I think will give us a chance of doing that. That said, the system needs to up the ante so that in six months, 12 months or two years’ time, and in particular when we reach the 2027 World Cup at home, the demographics of our team are different.”

Walter was explaining why his squad for the men’s T20 World Cup in the United States and the Caribbean in June included only one black and five brown players. Or why 60% were white in a country where the white population is estimated at 7.3%.

Walter knows the system. Seven black and brown Titans players during his tenure as that franchise’s coach, from 2013/14 to 2015/16, became internationals. But his statement might have been accompanied by a disclaimer: a winning team doesn’t mean a white team. All but one of the players South Africa took to each of their first three men’s World Cups — in 1992, 1996 and 1999 — were white. And yet they did not reach the final in any of those tournaments. They still haven’t.

Walter’s all-consuming job is to try to win World Cups. His job is not to find enough black and brown players who have escaped the circumstances of most South Africans of their races well enough to play international cricket. Making that team credibly represent South Africa is the job of the system. It has never done that. The current boss of that system is Rihan Richards, CSA’s president and the leader of the members council — the presidents of the 15 provincial unions and CSA’s highest decision-making body. Did Richards think Walter’s view was fair?

“Unless we take responsibility, things don’t change,” Richards told Cricbuzz. “So I understand what Rob is saying; that collectively we have to change. He has gone with specialists because that’s the way he feels he wants to play. That ethos must be cascaded into the system. Every player should know what we demand and everybody should strive for it. Rob is doing what he thinks is right. So we have to trust him. We’ve given him the authority, so we have to hold him accountable.”

Richards was first elected in 2013 to the majority non-independent CSA board that had to be dragged out of office kicking and screaming — with the help of the sports ministry — in October 2020. Richards had become president in the wake of Chris Nenzani’s resignation two months earlier. If the board had not been deposed, the pile-up of governance crises was set to plunge the game into an abyss from which it would have struggled to emerge. Most of the members of the reconstituted board are independent, and much of the authority is now vested in the chair, Lawson Naidoo, an independent. If Richards has been such a strong advocate for change, and been in positions to make it happen, why don’t we see more black and brown players in a South Africa shirt?

“Because the process of decision-making is too long,” Richards said. “We need to streamline it, and hold people accountable for what we appoint them to do. If they don’t, we move on. We take seven or eight months to get something done when it should be done in two months. If it means tearing down the system and rebuilding it, it shouldn’t take 10 years. We just keep hoping things will change. We must make the hard choices and refocus our expenses. We need to evaluate what is working and what’s not working.

“Players need to be able to trust the system. Irrespective of their race, creed or colour, they want a fair opportunity. They want to know that they’re backed and valued in the system. But there are so many shortcomings. The players’ salary bill in the SA20 is bigger than our professional budget. There are schools with bigger cricket budgets than the [provincial] affiliates.”

This comes across as nebulous weasel-wording by someone who is part of the problem. But Richards genuinely wants to leave the system better than he found it: “The minute something negative is said about you, you pass the buck, you try and blame someone else. We are responsible as a collective, whether it’s the board, the president of CSA, the provincial presidents, and we can all run and hide. But I have to lead the delegation to go and answer to the EPG [Eminent Persons Group] and the [parliamentary] portfolio committee on why we don’t make our [race] targets.”

Other national sides are free to select without satisfying the demands of a racial scorecard, notionally because their players are thought to have roughly equitable opportunities to reach the top. The South Africans are expected to choose a minimum of six black and brown players in every XI, at least two of them black. If the numbers don’t average out over the course of a year, CSA have to explain themselves to parliament. Should the politicians, many of whom couldn’t tell a googly from a thigh pad, not be satisfied they could order the withdrawal of CSA’s privilege of calling their teams South Africa.

If that seems radical, consider the reaction to a side taking the field at a packed Eden Gardens — six of them are white, the other five look south Asian. They are not New Zealand or England. They wear an attractive shade of blue, and their shirts read “India”. Would they be accepted anywhere from Indira Col to Kanniyakumari?

South Africa is deeply divided along socio-economic lines. According to the World Bank, it is the most unequal society on earth. Broadly, whites who were rich under apartheid — which was scrapped in 1994 — remain rich. The black middle class is growing, but blacks who were poor under apartheid remain so. While racism is no longer the law of the land, its tenets remain, in too many ways, the way South Africa functions. Or doesn’t.

Rampant government corruption, widespread white resistance to change, and the tendency of the moneyed — old and new, white and black — to insulate themselves from their country’s many challenges stymies attempts to build a fairer, better society. Cricket is part of the flotsam and jetsam of all that.

The better facilities are in largely white areas. To make their way in the game, black and brown players are all but forced to subject themselves to the comparative outlandishness of what not long ago were all-white elite schools. Affluent families have the means to indulge a younger member’s ambition of a career in professional cricket. Poorer families need them to get a proper job in an economy where the unemployment rate rose to 32.1% in the last quarter of 2023, and that’s the untrusted government figure.

More black and brown people than whites play and follow cricket in South Africa, but that isn’t accurately reflected on the field at higher levels. This isn’t for want of ongoing attempts to darken the game. Cricbuzz understands CSA’s board were on Friday presented with a detailed blueprint aimed at fast-tracking black batters, the country’s least spotted species of quality cricketer. It has been estimated that CSA invested USD5.4-million in transformation in the past financial year alone. Thousands of coaches spend thousands of hours searching for black and brown prospects. They won’t want to hear this, and they deserve better, but in terms of the big picture much of their effort fails.

Of the 131 men’s Test players picked since it became legal to choose from all races, after re-admission in 1991, 93 have been white and have filled 2,361 of the 3,212 places available in the XIs. That’s 70.99% and 73.50%. By this admittedly crude measure, there have been almost 10 times too many whites in South Africa’s Test teams taking up more than 10 times too many playing opportunities.

You don’t get that feeling reading the narrative about the end of Dean Elgar’s Test career. He was understandably upset at being summarily replaced by Temba Bavuma as South Africa’s captain in February last year. Elgar retired in January, after the home series against India. In several articles, the first published in March, the latest on Sunday, Elgar’s excoriating version of events has appeared without evidence of corroboration. Even when he has been quoted as saying something as potentially damaging, in legal terms, as, “Shukri Conrad is the reason my Test career was cut short.” For the record, Cricbuzz asked Conrad for comment. He has yet to respond.

The articles’ publication has generated an aghast response, which a section of South Africans will see as racist. What do we expect when a brown coach not only removes a white captain but replaces him with a black player? Of course arrogant, fragile, systemic whiteness will be loudly unhappy. Another section will see this as another example of South Africa’s slide into a swamp of identity politics.

The report in which the Elgar quote appeared said Graeme Smith had been fired as CSA’s director of cricket. In fact, he resigned. That’s no doubt an honest error, but it fuels the existing racist discourse of black and brown incompetence trying to deflect by wilfully ridding itself of white excellence.

Rugby keeps such nastiness muted by winning. The Springboks have been World Cup champions a record four times. When they triumphed the first time, in 1995, they also had — like cricket in that era — one player who wasn’t white, the brown Chester Williams. That was up to seven of a squad of 32, injury replacements included, when they won in 2007. It was 12 of 31 in 2019 and 14 of 35 in 2023. Keeping the race-obsessed at bay, the genius who engineered both of those latest successes said last week, was about more than juggling players.

“We struggle with the word transformation because a lot of us love to connect that to [moving] black people in and white people out,” Rassie Erasmus said after accepting an honorary doctorate from North West University in Potchefstroom on Friday. “But transformation in other countries means change. You change how you operate, how you communicate with the media, how you fight for your country, how diverse your management team is, how you select a team, what’s your work ethic is. That’s change, that’s transformation. We gave the word its real meaning.

“I went through all the phases as a player, a coach, an assistant coach, a technical analyst, and I saw a lot of mistakes that I probably made the most of. When I was in Ireland [coaching Munster in 2016 and 2017] and I could see what was happening, I thought, ‘We can fix this if we stop doing it by embarrassing a group of people or individuals.’ That was the cornerstone. In the Springbok team, you can be so honest and it feels really safe. But it’s not a place where you can hide.”

Maybe Walter is tired of hiding, but is not too tired to say so. He will find many of the former in South Africa’s cricket system, but not of the latter.

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Why are bowlers not often Test captains?

“The ‘brain style’ of being able to hold many possibilities in the head, and pick an immediate response, requires strategic and mental complexity. This ‘brain style’, which batsmen need, is similar to what captains require.” – Paddy Upton

Telford Vice / Cape Town

IF you have ambitions to captain a men’s Test team, don’t do a Tim Southee. As in bat in the lower order. The surest route is to take guard at No. 5, where almost half of all captains have batted. Other solid captaincy career moves are, in descending order of success, opening and batting at Nos. 4, 6, 7 and 3.

But of the 354 men who have led Test teams only 15 — 4.24% — have done so batting at No. 11, as Southee did for New Zealand against South Africa in Mount Maunganui last month. As many as 174 of the 354 — 49.15% — have batted at No. 5 as captain. You are almost a dozen times more likely to be handed the leadership as a No. 5 compared to when you bat last.

It’s not a perfect science because players don’t bat in the same place in the order every time. The balance of the team, strengths and weaknesses in different areas of an XI, match situations, the make-up of the opposition and the prevailing conditions get in the way of a neat explanation for who bats where, when, and regardless of whether they are the captain.

Southee, for instance, has had 14 innings as New Zealand’s captain — all from No. 8 downward but just one at No. 11. Famously, Graeme Smith ignored a broken hand to take guard at No. 11 at the SCG in January 2009. Michael Clarke had 110 innings at No. 5, but just 42 in the position as captain. Or only two more than his appearances at No. 4 when he was in charge of Australia’s Test team.

Of those 15 No. 11 captains, a dozen batted there from one to three times despite most of them playing exponentially more Tests. Only two, Courtney Walsh and Jack Blackham — Australia’s original Test wicketkeeper — had 10 or more innings as the last man in.

But the overall trend survives scrutiny: Nos. 1 to 4 have provided 39.64% of captains, Nos. 5 to 7 42.24% and Nos. 8 to 11 18.12%. Why are the lower reaches of the order starved of leadership opportunities? Do most bowlers and wicketkeepers have too much to think about and do to be lumped with captaincy? Conversely, do batters’ relatively lighter workloads make them better candidates?

Does a solid, steady batter inspire more confidence about their ability to think and act in tough situations than some tearaway quick? Is the preponderance of batting captains a nod to the chronic conservatism baked into a game that used to centre on grand amateurs paying professionals to bowl to them?

Paddy Upton, one of modern cricket’s most innovative thinkers, told Cricbuzz other factors might be at play: “Probably one of the primary ones is because of the mental requirement or skill for batsmen versus bowlers. A batsman is a responder in that they need to have a number of options in their mind in terms of attack and defence, and need to make a split-second decision once the ball leaves the bowler’s hand. Batsmen are generally responding to something the bowler initiates, for instance where the ball will land.

“They are asked to have a fast response to several options, with significant consequences for a correct versus incorrect response. Namely, losing their wicket. There is a lot more strategic thinking and a wider range of responses and decision-making involved, compared to bowlers.

“By contrast a bowler is an initiator in that they decide where the ball is going to go, and they have limited requirements to respond to external stimuli. Pretty much the only one would be a batsman moving in the split-second before the ball is released. It’s only really in that case that the bowler needs to have alternative strategies, and be able to respond immediately.

“The ‘brain style’ of being able to hold many possibilities in the head simultaneously, and then pick an immediate and consequential response, requires strategic and mental complexity. This ‘brain style’, which batsmen need, is similar to what captains require.”

There are, of course, exceptions; captains like Kapil Dev, Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Shaun Pollock, Jason Holder, Heath Streak and Jason Holder. Maybe they don’t stick out as anomalies because they arrived on the scene as fast bowlers and left as allrounders.

But there’s also Bob Willis, Waqar Younis and Walsh, captains, fast bowlers and poor batters all. Thus few would be able to stifle a chuckle at this line from Walsh: “I like to lead from the front. If I tell a youngster to do something and I’m not doing it, then that’s not right.”

That’s rich coming from someone who survived for an hour or more just five times in his 185 Test innings, who never faced more than 72 balls in any of them, was dismissed in the single figures 103 times — 43 of them ducks — and suffered 11 first-ballers. Whatever Walsh told the youngsters when he captained West Indies, it wasn’t how to bat. But that doesn’t matter if you take 519 wickets at 24.44.

Or 698 at 26.51, as James Anderson has done. Still, England’s evergreen fast bowler was disappointed not to have been in the captaincy conversation when Joe Root replaced Alistair Cook in April 2017. “It would have been nice to have been considered for it but whether I would have taken it or not, I am not sure,” Anderson said at the time. “I would have seriously thought about it. But if I was on the outside looking in I would have thought, ‘Is this actually where the team needs to go? With a 34-year-old as captain?’”

What about younger bowlers? Why don’t they crack the nod to captain more often? “Bowlers do tend to get injured, I suppose,” Anderson said. “That might be why Stuart Broad didn’t get asked this time. There are more injury risks but I am all for bowlers being captain.

“Most of the fast bowling captains I have played with or against have been pretty successful. Glen Chapple here at Lancashire won the championship [in 2011, for the first time in 77 years] – so I don’t know why more fast bowlers aren’t given the opportunity.”

Maybe, in Anderson’s case, because his Test batting average is 9.02. But that’s better than Walsh’s 7.54. Thing is, the Windies won or drew 15 of his 22 Tests as their captain, which they played from April 1994 to December 1997 — at the start of their long and ongoing decline.

During his tenure as leader Walsh batted at No. 9 three times and 10 times at No. 10. At No. 11? Fourteen times. He spent almost two-thirds of his batting career, as captain and not, coming in last.

Would it matter to him that he is among 4.24% of Test captains? Perhaps, but probably in a good way.

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SA20 does what Test cricket doesn’t

“It’s disappointing. It’s crazy that it happened. We’ve got to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” – Graeme Smith on the clash between the New Zealand Test series and the SA20.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

THEY wore white dungarees, gold-rimmed sunglasses and not much else. The significant amount of black skin they exposed on this incandescent afternoon soaked up the sunlight, which boomed off their bleached, close-cropped hair. They were young, beautiful, utterly in vogue, and of a gender that wasn’t immediately apparent or even, perhaps, fixed.

They were the last type of person you would expect to see at Newlands, the natural habitat of white and brown conservatives mired in the conventional and the way things should be done — by all of us, not just conservatives — because they’ve always been done that way. And yet there they were promenading the concourse in their dungarees and sunglasses and not a lot else, enjoying Saturday’s SA20 final along with everyone else.

Beyond all the numbers that prove the tournament’s success, that tell us why the second edition was better than the first, that assure us the competition has a solid future, there was this. The SA20 is doing something right if it attracts people who wouldn’t otherwise be seen dead at a place like Newlands.

The conservatives are still there. But if the game is to remain relevant in the real world it will need to develop new audiences. It will require, among others, fine-looking people in dungarees. The SA20 is doing its bit to pull them in even as it goes about its core business of keeping the game in South Africa afloat financially.

But that doesn’t sit comfortably 11,500 kilometres away in New Zealand, where South Africa are likely to lose a men’s Test series to the Kiwis for the first time in all 17 rubbers they have contested from February 1932. That will happen unless Neil Brand’s team find a way to win in Hamilton, where they were 220/6 at stumps on the first day of the second Test on Monday.

The strength of South Africa’s squad has been severely impacted by the players’ contractual obligation to prioritise the SA20, which clashed with the series. Most of the first-choice Test XI was involved in the tournament — and looked on from afar as New Zealand won the first Test, in Mount Maunganui, by 281 runs on Wednesday.

The SA20 has the better of this bargain. South Africa’s seemingly bottomless well of talent means the tournament does not want for players worthy of the stage it offers. So the comings and goings of foreign stars is felt less keenly as it is in the ILT20, which runs concurrently but is heavily dependent on players from other countries.

Graeme Smith is uniquely placed to consider those contrasting realities. As the SA20’s commissioner, he is the face of the tournament and is rightfully credited with the lion’s share of its resounding success. As South Africa’s Test captain, from April 2003 to March 2014, in 109 matches of which they won 53 — both world records — he took his team to the top of the rankings in August 2012, where they remained until May 2014. How did he feel, as an administrator, a former player and captain, a South African, about the fixture trainsmash?

“My job is to build the SA20 and make it a success, but my love for Test cricket hasn’t gone away; I care for it,” Smith told a press conference on Tuesday. “I sit on the MCC cricket committee, and we debated at length two weeks ago. The challenges for Test cricket are much deeper than just this scheduling issue. It’s about the funding, how the models work.

“We saw [CWI chief executive] Johnny Grave come out and say, after an incredible Test win [by West Indies by eight runs at the Gabba last month], that they lost more than USD1-million and didn’t earn a cent on that trip. How does the revenue work between bilaterals? The distributions? All these things in the game need to be spoken about to keep Test cricket strong.

“This scheduling issue [between the Test series in New Zealand and the SA20] shouldn’t have happened. It’s disappointing. It’s crazy that it happened. We’ve got to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Under Smith, South Africa won 48.62% of their Tests, lost 26.61% and drew 24.77%. Of the 79 completed matches they have played since his retirement, in March 2014, they have won 38 — a winning percentage a marginal 0.52 lower than in Smith’s era. But they have lost 39.24% and drawn 12.66% — deficits of 12.63% and 12.14%. South Africa have not been markedly less victorious after Smith, but they have been significantly poorer at not losing. “Our Test cricket has been a challenge for a long time performance-wise,” Smith said. “I’d love to see that team strong again.”

That team had their best day of their tour to New Zealand on Tuesday. Having slipped to 150/6 after tea, they were well-served by an unbroken stand of 70 shared by Ruan de Swardt and 37-year-old debutant Shaun von Berg. South Africa might have been in a stronger position had David Bedingham not been caught off his boot after scoring a sturdy 39. “There’s so many ways in cricket to ruin your day and that’s one of them,” Bedingham told reporters. Maybe slipping on a pair of white dungarees would make him feel better.

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What Test cricket shares with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy

“I want to see Test cricket being played in 50 or 100 years’ time. But we are seeing that a lot of things are at a crossroads. It feels like something has to give.” – Faf du Plessis

Telford Vice / Cape Town

A middle finger was raised into the bleached sunshine of a blustery lunchtime at an upscale hotel in Camps Bay, a blingy suburb on Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard, on Monday. The apparent insult was aimed towards a gaggle of familiar faces gathered on a walkway, but probably meant for one among them: Graeme Smith. The finger was attached to the arm of another familiar face: Kevin Pietersen’s.

The others in the scene were Keshav Maharaj, Faf du Plessis, Kieron Pollard, David Miller, Wayne Parnell and Aiden Markram — the captains of the teams who will contest the second edition of the SA20, which starts on Wednesday.

Pietersen will commentate on the tournament. His raised digit, which was accompanied by a smirk and received by Smith with a smile, was evidence that, however much cricket changes, there’s still room for juvenile ideas of humour. It also served as a hook on which to hang the looming subplot to this year’s SA20; the tournament and its ilk are giving the game’s other forms, particularly Test cricket, the finger.

Nine days into the SA20, South Africa’s men’s squad will board a flight to New Zealand to play two Tests. Of the 14, half will be uncapped, including Neil Brand, the captain. Only David Bedingham and Keegan Petersen featured in the Tests against India in the past 14 days. Most of the rest of the 16 who played against the Indians are legally bound — like all of CSA’s contracted players — to make the SA20 their top priority, ahead even of international commitments.

The squad’s announcement on December 30 triggered a wave of hand-wringing, much of it sanctimonious, describing the moment as defining the damage that franchise leagues are doing to the greater good of the game. Few considered the fact that the SA20 makes more money for CSA than most of the international cricket South Africa’s teams play. Neither that, without the tournament, South Africa would in a few years not have enough money to keep playing internationally in the manner to which they and their supporters have become accustomed.

No-one seems able to see the greater truth. In the same way that children of many cultures grow up and learn that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy do not exist, it’s time for everyone to grow up and understand that the international game is not where cricket’s future lay as a going concern. Could we wake up already from the pseudo-nationalistic fantasy to the reality that franchise tournaments are financially more relevant and significant than international cricket? And that, without the resources they generate, the so-called higher level would be poorer in every way?

“That’s where the game of cricket is, unfortunately,” Du Plessis said. “Since we have seen the [rise of the] big three, there has been more pressure on the rest of the countries. Everything is about money. So if it means Test cricket survives because of [the SA20] …”

This, mind, from someone who made his name as a Test player. Batting for almost eight hours to score a match-saving century, as Du Plessis did on debut in Adelaide in November 2012, will do that. “I’m a Test purist; I want to see Test cricket still being played in 50 or 100 years’ time,” Du Plessis said. “But we are seeing that a lot of things are at a crossroads. It feels like something has to give. There’s talk of the FTP being too full. Maybe it’s worth considering playing four-day Test matches so you have extra days in the calendar.”

Having made clear he was “not a big fan of two-Test series”, and sketched a scenario that, in a more sensible, less hidebound cricket world, could have extended India’s rubber in South Africa: “Everyone walks away from this series thinking there should have been one more match. I was joking with Aiden earlier. I said why didn’t the captains get together after South Africa lost in a-day-and-a-half [at Newlands last week, leaving the series drawn 1-1] to say let’s play another Test match tomorrow. It will probably only take three days.”

More seriously, Du Plessis said: “I hope the game will look after Test cricket. There’s enough happening and enough people talking about it that it’s time for people to say let’s revisit Test cricket. Australia, India and England are well looked after in this cycle, but the other teams really struggle.”

England are scheduled to play 43 Tests in the 2023 to 27 cycle, India 38 and Australia 36. South Africa? Twenty-eight. The only sides who will play five-Test series are Australia, England and India. None of South Africa’s rubbers is longer than two Tests.

What are boards like CSA supposed to do if not hatch grand plans like the SA20? This, too, has an Indian angle — all of the franchises are satellites of the IPL mothership. For some, that’s a problem. Here in the real world, it’s a strength. Without the financial heft provided by that ownership, the SA20 wouldn’t attract the world’s top players — including South Africa’s.

“Last year surprised me with how good it was,” Du Plessis said. “We’re ahead of where we thought we would be. The standard was incredible. The secret always lies in the national players being available. I’ve played in some competitions where you get the national players for only half or a third of the competition and then the standard really drops. You don’t want it to compete against Test cricket, but all the national players being available for this competition is a very strong feature for its future.”

Players like Markram, who said he “gets the financial side [of the importance of franchise leagues] 100%”. Even so, he knew that, “You want to play Test cricket as a cricketer. It’s still my most favourite format. But the cards have been dealt and we are unfortunately going to miss that series in New Zealand.”

To Smith, the SA20’s commissioner, falls the job of making the tournament entertaining enough to keep drawing crowds and viewers and — in a perfect world — pertinent enough to the game’s more conservative audience to win at least some of them over. Last year, the SA20 arrived in the shadow of South Africa’s shock loss to the Netherlands at the men’s T20 World Cup and a 2-0 thumping in a men’s Test series in Australia. The tournament banished the gloom and lit up the game, not least because it was — to the spectators and viewers — cricket without consequence. The teams didn’t exist in any meaningful way in the South African consciousness, so who cared who won? It also helped that there was daylight between the SA20 and CSA, who the properly and often unfairly cynical among the cricketminded in this country will tell you turn anything and everything they touch to scrap.

“The Proteas have always been the strongest brand in South African cricket,” Smith said. “But we really want to bring the gees [spirit] back to cricket, that feeling that rugby has built over the last two cycles [by winning the World Cup in 2019 and 2023]. The SA20 is another advantage for the Proteas that can bring the feeling back to the game, get people enjoying it again and focusing on the cricket and having a great night out. That’s what we want to do, and then the players have the platform to do what they need to do. We want to be a value-add for South African cricket.”

It’s a tightrope not made easier to walk by the view that this year’s SA20 must be better than the 2023 version if it is to be regarded as a success. How might that be accomplished? “There’s always an element of luck required with these things,” Smith said. “We hope, going into the last week, every team can still qualify; that’s it’s been competitive and there’s been some great story lines.

“Operationally the teams work extremely hard to deliver at the level that we want. We feel like we’ve involved some of the best people from around the world and locally. There’s always challenges that come your way. It’s about how you deal with them. There are more than 500,000 tickets to sell for the 34 games, and you want to be able to attract the fans to the stadiums, and to get them back.

“I was looking at Newlands the other day and the two days of international cricket it got this season. The SA20 is a form of international cricket that that stadium is going to have. It’s bringing high-profile content to six regions, and players fans wouldn’t have got to see otherwise.

“We’re very intentional about trying to attract the 18 to 35 audience that’s new to cricket, who can come and have a fantastic time, and who then hopefully fall in love with the game. Hopefully the exposure will bring great players out who will then cross formats. It’s domestic cricket, but the platform and the competition here make it a bridge closer to international cricket.”

Between them, Pietersen, Smith, Du Plessis and Markram have played 327 Tests and captained teams in 148 of them. They will remain primarily Test cricketers in the public imagination. Yet they are embedded in a project that promotes the antithesis. Yes, they are being paid handsomely for their trouble. But they also know that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy do not exist.

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David says no to SA20 Goliath

“I took my name out of the SA20 draft so I could play Tests in New Zealand.” – David Bedingham

Telford Vice / Cape Town

A dozen days after the Newlands men’s Test is scheduled to end, David Bedingham will board a flight to New Zealand as one of the most experienced players in South Africa’s squad. He will, if he is in the XI in Cape Town, have two caps.

But that’s two more than half the members of a squad of 14 that currently hold 50 caps between them. Or 300 fewer than South Africa’s current squad — a dozen of whom won’t be in New Zealand because they have been signed by SA20 franchises. The tournament will be played from January 10 to February 10, and the Tests, in Mount Maunganui and Hamilton, from February 4 to 13.

Players who are contracted by CSA are required to make themselves available for the SA20, and they are compelled to put the tournament ahead of their international commitments. Bedingham does not have a CSA contract. Also, he has priorities that differ from many modern players’.

So when Shukri Conrad, South Africa’s red-ball coach and sole selector since January last year, told Bedingham a place in the squad for New Zealand could be up for grabs because of the clash with the SA20, Bedingham knew what to do.

“Shuks called and said there’s a possibility, and as soon as I hear there’s a chance … I’m quite a realistic guy, but when I heard that no-one in the SA20 could play I thought my chances of playing [in New Zealand] would be quite high,” Bedingham said on Monday. “So I didn’t give it a second thought. I told him I’d take my name straight out of the draft, so I could hopefully play.”

Yes, you read that right: Bedingham chose Tests over T20s. “If those T20 comps come up for me, perfect,” he said. “But the main aim is always Test cricket. Or first-class cricket.” It seems four days at blustery, all but deserted, sagging into disrepair Newlands playing for Western Province, or at the Riverside for second-division Durham — who he has turned out for since August 2020 with a view to obtaining a UK passport — is further up Bedingham’s to-do list than landing a glitzy T20 deal. Or maybe, given his T20 strike rate of 128.84 and the fact that he’s played 87 first-class matches and 55 T20s, he knows what butters his bread.

But what would happen if a franchise in the SA20 offered him a million-billion in the coming days? Would he get back to Shuks to say he wouldn’t be going to New Zealand after all? “I took my name out of the draft so I could play in New Zealand,” Bedingham said. “Even if they wanted to I don’t think I would be allowed to play [in the SA20] because my name wasn’t in there originally.”

On Saturday, South Africans learned that Tony de Zorzi, who is expected to step into the breach left when Dean Elgar retires after the Newlands Test, had been signed by Durban’s Super Giants and so had taken himself out of the equation for New Zealand.

Like Bedingham, De Zorzi isn’t contracted by CSA. Unlike Bedingham, he had kept his name in the SA20 hat. Doubtless that will earn De Zorzi criticism. It shouldn’t. His match fees in New Zealand are unlikely to come close to what DSG would have agreed to pay him. And, without a CSA contract and besides what he earns from WP — which won’t be much — De Zorzi has no salary security. Given those realities who wouldn’t have taken up DSG’s offer?

Bedingham, it would seem. But he has had different realities to overcome. Bedingham had to be cut from the wreckage of a car crash in December 2016 in which his jaw, hands and legs were damaged so badly it seemed his cricket career was over. He was sidelined for three days short of a year and, in his second match back, a list A game for Boland against Border in East London, he scored 104 not out. He made four more centuries in his next 13 first-class and list A innings.

Bedingham ended his 2023 campaign for Durham in September with 156 in a first-class match against Leicestershire at the Riverside. He has scored a century and five half-centuries in 14 first-class and list A innings for WP this summer.

That was enough to crack the nod with Conrad earlier than the New Zealand tour; in the first Test against India in Centurion last week. He repaid that faith by scoring a fluid, assured 56, a performance that would be beyond many debutants. But perhaps not those who will turn 30 in April and have taken guard for the 137th time in a first-class match. Did he feel as if he should have earned his chance earlier?

“If it happened three years ago or if it happened a week ago, it’s fine with me,” Bedingham said. “But because I’ve played so much it makes you learn your ups and your downs. That prepares you better for Test match cricket. It helped me with trying to keep my emotions low and focusing as best as I could.”

Asked by reporters from India who his boyhood cricketing heroes were, Bedingham said, “Definitely Herschelle Gibbs. Jacques Kallis was from my school [Wynberg Boys’ High] … or, I was from his school. So I tended to watch those two.” Pushed further on the subject by those reporters, who are — compared to the South African press — starved of interactions with India’s players, Bedingham said his favourite stars from that country were “by a country mile” Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma. “When I was 13 to 15, or even 18, I was trying to mould my technique on theirs. So if I had a bad game I’d change my technique to copy Kohli’s, and if that failed I’d try copy Sharma.”

While that was going on a familiar figure arrived on Newlands’ outfield to observe South Africa’s training session. Sensibly dressed on a hot day in shorts and a casual shirt, he was surrounded by his children, had a friend in tow, and was greeted warmly by Conrad and some of the players.

He was, depending on who you ask, the man who had saved cricket in South Africa from itself by making the first edition of the SA20 a resounding success, or the man to blame for the state of the squad being sent to New Zealand. Happy New Year, SA20 league commissioner Graeme Smith.

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Elgar goes where Bavuma doesn’t tread

“Temba should have done it. Graeme Smith did it. That should tell you that the captain does not only think of himself. He thinks of the team.” – Makhaya Ntini

Telford Vice / Centurion

WHERE was the captain? He had last been on the field during play on Tuesday, in the 20th over of the first Test. He left with a hamstring strain; not the same one he hurt during the World Cup, so let’s not stoke theories about him playing injured. But, surely, by all that it means to lead, he should have been padded up and in the dugout when South Africa’s ninth wicket fell at Centurion on Thursday.

He wasn’t, and so Marco Jansen had to leave behind the finest innings of his Test career a bittersweet 16 runs shy of a first century. So what? It’s a team game, remember? Indeed, it is: the captain’s team were forced to abandon runs on a pitch that would have remained good for batting for the rest of the third day’s play — runs they left India to score instead, which could have impacted the course of the match.

It didn’t. The home side’s fast bowlers produced a vintage performance, even by their towering standards, to clinch victory inside three days — South Africa’s first win by an innings over India since December 2010. Where? At fortress Centurion, where they have been beaten only three times in 29 Tests; including by India in December 2021.

The second and last Test at Newlands starts on Wednesday. Even if India win they will go home defeated. Their final frontier, a series triumph in this country, remains a looming edifice that has yet to be breached.

There was much for South Africa to celebrate, but not everything. Their captain’s hamstring, for instance, and what that might mean for Cape Town. Shukri Conrad confirmed Bavuma was out of the second Test and would have his injury assessed in two weeks’ time to find out whether he will be fit for the SA20, which starts on January 10. Dean Elgar, who had stepped into the breach had Bavuma left and followed that by scoring a fluent 185, would captain the team in his final Test. Zubayr Hamza had been called up to the squad to replace Bavuma.

Finally, straight answers were had. But not before the vacuum around Bavuma’s status had been filled by all manner of conjecture. His detractors — racist haters, many of them — need no second invitation to board the Bavuma bashing bandwagon at the best of times. They had more than enough opportunity to do that in this instance, and for once they had a decent argument.

Centurion’s surface had sweated under the covers for 40 hours while 51 millimetres of rain fell in the 36 hours before the scheduled start of the game. Then two days of significant cloud cover added to the already stiff challenge of batting on the Highveld. Thursday dawned bright and almost clear, and the sun did its bit to flatten the pitch into its best state for batting. But from Friday, on the evidence of previous Centurion Tests, the bounce would have become unreliable.

Only eight of the other 28 completed Tests at this ground reached the fourth innings. Six were won by the team batting last, but they had to score 150 or more runs on the last day — or what became the last day — just twice.

Bavuma had played nine first-class matches in Centurion before Tuesday, six of them Tests. He would have known all of the above, and more. So why hadn’t he been carried, if required, down the 48 stairs that lead from the players’ balcony to the boundary? If that had happened, and once Nandré Burger had been undone and yorked by the shimmering brilliance of Jasprit Bumrah in the ninth over after lunch, Bavuma could have been helped all the way to the non-striker’s end. All he had to do in the cause was stand there.

Because that’s what captains do. It’s what Graeme Smith did, famously, with a broken hand and an injured elbow at the SCG in January 2009. And that, mind, in an ultimately failed attempt to draw a match in a series South Africa had already won. Smith walked out in Jacques Kallis’ whites because his own had been packed away — he was not supposed to have batted in the second innings. Why was it too much to ask this time? The teammate Smith joined in the middle that day in Sydney almost 15 years ago had a similar question.

“Temba should have done it,” Makhaya Ntini told Cricbuzz. “Graeme Smith did it. That should tell you that the captain does not only think of himself. He thinks of the team. If Jansen had got into the 90s, Temba should have batted. The most important thing is to show that you appreciate what the other guys are doing. If Temba had done that he would have been a hero. He could have come and stood at one end and let Jansen do his job. I have no idea why that didn’t happen.”

Neither did anyone else, and not for want of trying to find out. Team management told reporters on Tuesday that scans had revealed the strain and that Bavuma would “undergo daily medical evaluations to determine his participation in the match”.

Despite several attempts by the press and SuperSport, CSA’s rights-holders, to obtain updates, none more were forthcoming until after tea on Thursday — after Ntini had spoken — when management said: “Following continuous medical assessments, it was determined there was too much of a risk of aggravating his injury had he gone out to bat at this stage of the game. The medical team are managing him to give him the best chance to bat should he be required in the fourth innings.”

Why had that taken so long to come out? It seems the information blackout was part of the gameplan. “Temba is not in a great physical state,” Conrad said. “He was ready to bat at every turn, and we kept monitoring it. You put something out there … I don’t know if the opposition pick up on it … certain things are tactical.

“When we reached what we reached [a lead of 163], and not because we felt that was enough, we felt that if we sent him out then there was a potential risk that he could aggravate the injury even further.

“We are constantly giving ourselves maximum time so we can give the right information. Sometimes, if you put things out there prematurely, people run away with certain stories. This was all about monitoring it throughout the day.

“If we lost wickets early, he probably would have walked in at some stage. But things went really well for us. We even got a message out to Marco and Nandré to take every run. Because the talk last night was to get 150 ahead. Then we could boss the game. We got there, and then I felt it wasn’t necessary to risk Temba. That was my call entirely.”

And it was justified, as it turned out. India crumbled to 131 all out in 34.1 overs in the face of the pace onslaught as the afternoon’s drama unfolded under a roiling mass of building dark clouds.

The Indians failed to establish a single partnership that endured for more runs or more balls than the 39 Shubman Gill and Virat Kohli shared off 51, and that despite three catches going down in the cordon. All that stood between the visitors and a bigger hiding was Kohli’s class and determination. But even he had a breaking point, and it was reached with nine down when he hoisted Burger down the ground and into the gloom.

Kagiso Rabada made many metres from long-on, dived and held on to complete the fearless, fiery Burger’s fourth wicket and dismiss Kohli for 76. Elgar, converging on the same spot from long-off but beaten to the ball by the supreme athlete, was the first to celebrate the catch and the victory with Rabada.

Behind their backs, the most vocal section of the crowd, where the brass band had serenaded Elgar with a stirring rendition of Forever Young after his throw from the deep to Rabada had run out Bumrah to reduce India to 113/8, erupted with joy.

All hung back to allow Elgar, souvenir stump in hand, to scale those 48 stairs first. Already his century seemed wrapped in glory. Already the fairytale of his swansong at Newlands was being written. Bavuma greeted Elgar at the top of the stairs. He was, it can be reported, standing.

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From a pair to peerless: Elgar’s journey almost complete

Elgar is fixed in the South African imagination as a symbol of excellence.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

RICKY Ponting said through a veil of near-tears that the match would be the last of his 168 Tests, and walked to the middle to begin his final innings through a guard of honour formed by the applauding South Africans.

In the same match Hashim Amla made 196 and AB de Villiers 169 in a second innings of 569 that featured three century stands. South Africa won by 309 runs to seal their second consecutive series win in Australia.

Only four more Tests would be played at one of the game’s great grounds before big cricket moved across the Swan River to the vast monument to grandiose nondescriptness called Perth Stadium.

Reasons to remember the Waca Test of November and December 2012 are in rich supply, not the least of them that the match was Dean Elgar’s debut. And that he became the 38th man to record a pair on the august occasion. That kind of thing slips under the radar when your team win by 309 runs, but resurfaces when you announce the end of your career. Especially a career as significant as Elgar’s.

A CSA release on Friday said South Africa’s two Tests against India, starting in Centurion on Tuesday, would be Elgar’s last. He will step over the boundary for the final time at Newlands, where — the release noted with neat diplomacy — “he scored his first Test runs”; 21 of them in his only innings in the January 2013 Test against New Zealand. The next time Elgar took guard, at St George’s Park in the next match of that series, he made the first of his 13 centuries: an unbeaten 103.

Elgar opened the batting for the first time in a Test in his eighth match, against Australia at St George’s Park in February 2014, with Graeme Smith. From there, the only instance in Elgar’s 140 other innings when he didn’t walk out at the start of the innings was against Australia at Newlands in March 2014, when he batted at No. 3. Smith announced his retirement during the same match.

No leap of faith is required to link Elgar with Smith. Both bat in a fashion that exposes as a myth the theory that all left-handers are elegant at the crease. Both bowl a surprisingly effective brand of finger spin, though not using the same arm. Both captained South Africa. Both would, in a less careful age, be labelled hard bastards.

But Smith and Elgar played only nine Tests together — all with Smith as captain — and were an opening pair in just four innings. When Smith called it quits, dramatically and probably prematurely, South African cricket looked around for a reasonable facsimile to serve as a ready replacement. Elgar fitted the bill.

Still, it took him 67 Tests to succeed Smith as the permanent captain, what with South Africa first wending their way through Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers, Faf du Plessis and Quinton de Kock. Long before he was appointed Elgar had stood in for Du Plessis in two Tests, and he was in charge for 15 more before being replaced by Temba Bavuma in February. Under Elgar South Africa won series in West Indies and at home against India before drawing in New Zealand and beating Bangladesh at home. Losses at home to England and in Australia, and a change of direction under new Test coach Shukri Conrad, cost him his job.

Even so, among the 16 captains who led South Africa in at least 10 Tests, Elgar is one of only six who presided over more victories than defeats. But it’s more as a player and a person that he will be remembered and appreciated. Determined, pugnacious, belligerent, loyal, bluecollar, workmanlike, a fighter are some of the descriptors applied to him. All are apt. Some could spark trouble.

There was a murmur of the latter in April 2022 during the home series against Bangladesh, when Elgar defended his team’s aggressive approach by saying: “It’s a man’s environment when it comes to playing at this level, and I intend to play the game hard.” It was an alarming assertion considering women also play Test cricket. And more so in an era when toxic masculinity cannot be glibly excused, regardless of the intention involved.

But, mostly, Elgar’s unvarnished honesty has been a welcome relief compared to the media-trained nothingness that too many players trot out relentlessly in their desperation to avoid saying anything interesting. For instance, during South Africa’s November 2016 series in Australia, it was put — albeit informally — to Elgar that, in day/night Tests, batting orders should be reversed. Nos. 10 and 11 should open and the regular openers would bat last. Or maybe in the middle order. That way players who had better techniques would be at the crease at sunset, when the pink ball starts swinging wildly. Elgar took it all in, thought for no longer than it would take him to decide whether to play or leave, and said: “That’s a fucking stupid idea.”

He has walked that kind of talk. No South Africa player has scored more runs during Elgar’s career than his 5,146. Of the 13 players worldwide who have made more runs, eight have also had more innings. Among the eight, only David Warner and Dimuth Karunaratne have opened regularly. Alastair Cook and Tom Latham are the only openers who have scored more runs in fewer innings than Elgar during his career.

Beyond the numbers, it’s what Elgar represents that wins him supporters. When he made his first-class debut, in February 2006, South Africa’s now abolished franchise system was in its second season. Elgar had played 74 first-class matches before he took guard that day at the Waca in November 2012. South Africa had prised the Test mace from England that August. Had they lost in Australia the mace would have stayed there. Instead, Smith’s team brought it back to South Africa — where it stayed until May 2014. Elgar was key to that happening, thus he is fixed in the South African imagination as a symbol of excellence; part of the golden generation that included Smith, Amla, Jacques Kallis, De Villiers, Dale Steyn and Vernon Philander.

“He’s going to leave a massive hole,” Tabraiz Shamsi told Cricbuzz. “Dean’s been an integral part especially of the Test team. With less and less Test cricket being played, to lose that sort of experience isn’t good. It will take a lot more years to have someone with that much experience. His experience in the changeroom — to be able to help the guys who are there — is going to be a big loss.”

What about the impression Elgar will leave, for some, and unfairly so, as an old-fashioned grinder-outer of runs with little or no regard for entertaining those who had paid good money to watch him bat? “World cricket thinks it can move on from players like that, but at the end of the day it’s about playing good cricket,” Shamsi said. “People may think it’s all about slogging, even in white-ball cricket. But if conditions are tough you can’t just slog. When times and conditions are tough you have to knuckle down, and Dean’s that sort of player.”

Elgar is also the sort of player who rises to a challenge. Here’s one: the 45 players — 10 of them South Africans — who have suffered a pair on Test debut include Graham Gooch, Ken Rutherford, Saeed Anwar and Marvan Atapattu. But, among all 45, only Anwar also scored a century in his last Test. How stupid is the idea that Elgar could join that elite club?

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CSA up to speed in fitness rethink, but domestic game lags

“Of course players have a responsibility to be fit, but you can’t nail players for fitness if the systems aren’t good enough.” – Andrew Breetzke, South African Cricketers’ Association chief executive.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

ALAN Shearer spent 1,100 hours on the football pitch playing for Southampton, Blackburn, Newcastle and England. Gary Lineker logged more than 625 hours for Leicester, Everton, Barcelona, Tottenham, England, and Nagoya Grampus.

Shearer played 88.27% of his 767 games from start to finish and Lineker 79.73% of his 444. Between them they were on the field for the equivalent of more than 246 days of Test cricket.

Lineker and Shearer were supremely athletic specimens of the human form: lean, strong, fast and apparently preternaturally equipped to manifest themselves like apparitions at the precise moment a goal needed scoring. Shearer netted 391 for club and country, including a record 260 in the English Premier League. Lineker struck 238 times. Some of football’s biggest clubs paid them millions to do just that. They cost a combined USD30,800,000 in transfer fees alone.

But, had they been South African cricketers, even of a calibre similar to what they were as footballers, they likely wouldn’t have played a single match for the national side despite their ability as ace goal poachers. Because, until a few days ago, CSA wouldn’t have budged from their rigid attitude to fitness. And there was no way Shearer or Lineker would have run two kilometres in less than eight minutes and 30 seconds — the test South Africa’s male cricketers had to pass to be eligible for selection.

“I hated pre-season with a passion,” Shearer said on August 7 on a trailer for a new podcast, The Rest is Football. “It actually used to spoil the last week of my holiday. I just couldn’t run, and everyone used to think I was taking the piss and being lazy. I was 30 or 40 yards back from the group. You used to get the fit guys who used to sprint past you and laugh at you, and I used to shout, ‘Get the fucking ball off us, then let’s see how good you are.’”

Lineker, Shearer’s co-podcaster, empathised: “I was exactly the same. I couldn’t run long distance.” Lineker told the story of being tasked to run, in training, two laps of “a couple of miles” with Spurs’ squad: “On the first lap I was already behind everyone else. I hid behind a bush, and when [the rest of the players] went past me I jumped out and joined them. And I was still last.”

Lizelle Lee and Dané van Niekerk know how Shearer and Lineker felt. Lee retired from international cricket in July last year after missing fitness targets. Van Niekerk wasn’t considered for the T20 World Cup, which was played in South Africa in February, because she failed to run two kilometres in nine minutes and 30 seconds — CSA’s requirement for women. Van Niekerk ended her international career in March.

Lee and Van Niekerk were as central to South Africa’s teams as Shearer and Lineker were to theirs. Lee is second only to Mignon du Preez among her country’s all-time run-scorers in ODIs and first in T20Is, where Van Niekerk is second. Shabnim Ismail, Marizanne Kapp and Van Niekerk are, in that order, South Africa’s leading wicket-takers in ODIs as well as T20Is.

The South Africans reached this year’s T20 World Cup final — the first senior team of any gender from their country to make it to a World Cup decider — where they went down to Australia. What difference might the presence of Lee and Van Niekerk have made to their chances of winning?

What damage might be done to the South Africa’s ODI World Cup campaign in India in October and November should the fitness rule be applied to Sisanda Magala, who is his team’s leading bowler in the format this year in terms of wickets and average but has had trouble running his two kilometres fast enough to satisfy the suits?

These questions might have informed CSA’s decision, which reached the press’ ears at the weekend, to change their approach. In future players who fail fitness tests could, at the coach’s behest, still be selected for South Africa — although the document announcing the change said CSA would “strongly recommend” they “should not take the field in an official match”. A similar approach applies in other countries. South Africa’s catching up in this regard chimes with another change enacted during Enoch Nkwe’s tenure as CSA’s director of cricket: giving coaches, rather than selection panels, the responsibility for picking squads and XIs.

The upshot was that “coaches must take ownership of their teams”, Andrew Breetzke, the chief executive of the South African Cricketers’ Association, told Cricbuzz. That, Breetzke said, was part of a newfound maturity about the cricket industry’s frailties in South Africa: “Of course players have a responsibility to be fit, but you can’t nail players for fitness if the systems aren’t good enough. Either you’re policy-driven or value-driven. I’d say this is a more value-driven system.”

CSA provides much of their provinces’ funding, including for the provision of fitness experts. But, too often, the cash-strapped provinces spend as little as they can by appointing junior staff — who do not have the skill and experience, nor the players’ respect, to enforce a regime that will produce more physically honed cricketers. So they don’t, and the bad habits are entrenched by the time players reach international level — where some of them suffer a rude awakening. As one administrator said, “Unless you change the culture below it’s always going to be an issue.”

That fitness isn’t an issue in countries where domestic structures are better resourced proves the point. Players arrive at the top tier in fine fettle, and stay that way because being in the best shape possible has long been an entrenched part of their game.

Rob Walter was South Africa’s men’s strength and conditioning specialist from 2009 to 2013 and their white-ball head coach from January. Did he see the question from a fitness or a coaching perspective?

“It’s the oldest cliché in the book, but it’s about following the process,” Walter told a press conference on Monday. “For me it’s a process of getting guys fitter and up to standard. I have an obsession with getting better, so I expect everyone in the team to look to get better. It’s our job, as the support staff, to support them in that endeavour.”

Magala is an interesting example. “Sisanda has been electric for us on the park recently and we want to acknowledge those performances,” Walter said. “But we also want to acknowledge that our endeavour is to get better, fitter and stronger because that gives us a better chance of performing. Our job is to provide the platform for the players to improve.”

The argument is that Magala would be an even better bowler, and less susceptible to injury, if he lost weight. The counter is that none of South Africa’s other, slimmer, seamers are bowling as well as he is. Magala was also successful in the inaugural edition of the SA20 in January and February, when only four bowlers took more wickets than his 14 in a dozen games. How did the SA20 feel about fitness?

“It’s not something the league got involved in,” Graeme Smith, the tournament’s commissioner, told reporters in Johannesburg on Tuesday. “We come up with the regulations that the teams operate within. Fitness requirements we leave to the teams and their professionals to manage.”

Smith was Nkwe’s predecessor as CSA director of cricket. The old rules predated Smith’s appointment in December 2019 but had not been comprehensively enforced. That raised questions over fairness: some players who might have fallen foul of the conditioning police did not. Others did. Consistency was required. That understandable ambition lost its way, through the involvement of elements at CSA that went beyond Smith’s ambit, into adherence rigorous enough to deny defaulting players places in teams.

Lineker never knew how that felt. Hiding behind a bush when he should have been running with his teammates earned him a summons to manager Terry Venables’ office and a dressing down. But he wasn’t benched. Because he, like Shearer, was hired to score goals. Not run. That’s what midfielders do.

Cricket’s version of that logic has landed in South Africa, albeit too late for Lee and Van Niekerk. But not for Magala, and those who will come after him for as long as the domestic game can’t keep up with international standards.

Cricbuzz

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SA20 chickens come home to roost for CSA

“Will have to put my thinking cap on.” – Shukri Conrad on picking a squad for February’s Test series in New Zealand.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

SIX months ago the inaugural edition of the SA20 was hailed as the best thing to happen to South African cricket for years. The players, the public and even the press concurred that the tournament had lifted the game out of the deep doldrums it had been cast into by maladministration, a shaky wider economy and the impact of the pandemic.

On Tuesday that opinion had to be revisited in the wake of confirmation, with the announcement of next year’s SA20 fixtures, that the tournament would clash with a Test series in New Zealand. The SA20 is majority owned by CSA, who are also responsible for managing South Africa’s international commitments. Because the tournament makes money it takes priority. It is, officially, more important than Test, ODI or T20I cricket.

Shukri Conrad was resigned to taking to New Zealand a squad heavily impacted by the SA20’s demand on resources that would otherwise be his as South Africa’s Test coach. “The tour is on and players contracted to play SA20 will not be available for selection,” Conrad told Cricbuzz on Tuesday. “That’s about as much as I can say. Will have to put my thinking cap on …”

Doubtless Conrad has been doing that for weeks. Pholetsi Moseki, CSA’s chief executive, told Cricbuzz on July 21: “Because of our contractual obligations to the SA20, and because I’ve bet and CSA have bet everything on the SA20, we have to guarantee players for the SA20.”

Moseki reiterated the status quo on Tuesday: “Yes, the Proteas players in the SA20 will not be going to New Zealand. That is the directive from CSA.”

There is nowhere for most of the Test squad to go between the rock of India’s tour to South Africa, which ends on January 7, and the hard place of the New Zealand series, which starts on February 4. The SA20 will run from January 10 to February 10.

How many players might be taken out of the mix for the Tests? Nine of the XI in South Africa’s most recent Test, against West Indies at the Wanderers in March, played in this year’s SA20. The exceptions were Dean Elgar and Tony de Zorzi.

The SA20 franchises will complete their squads at an auction on September 27. But already their rosters feature Aiden Markram, Temba Bavuma, Ryan Rickelton, Heinrich Klaasen, Keshav Maharaj, Simon Harmer, Gerald Coetzee, Kagiso Rabada, Tabraiz Shamsi, Lungi Ngidi, Anrich Nortjé, Marco Jansen. Players who have fallen out of Test favour, but who represent the depth of talent and experience the national teams would turn to in a pinch, are also committed to the SA20. They include Rassie van der Dussen, Sarel Erwee, Wiaan Mulder, George Linde and Beuran Hendricks.

How were CSA going to manage what looks like a looming crisis? “Plans are on track,” Moseki said. “The auction will be the next milestone and Shukri will then determine player availability for the tour.”

The New Zealanders are, understandably, set on playing the Tests on the stipulated dates. A T20I visit there by Pakistan will end on January 21 and Australia will play the first match of their tour on February 21. The SA20? Not the Kiwis’ issue.

The SA20, too, is standing its ground. “It’s a very difficult one to get into, but we are engaging with Pholetsi and his team consistently,” Graeme Smith, the league’s commissioner told reporters in Johannesburg on Tuesday. “Obviously our goal at SA20 is to just elevate and focus on what we control, and that’s ultimately making sure our event is the best. That’s been very clear from the start, in terms of how things were created and structured. Our job is to engage as early as possible to set our store window for four weeks, and things go from there.

“From our side to see the clash is not ideal but we’re just going to try and focus on making sure we deliver the best four weeks of competition and we’ll hopefully leave the rest to CSA to figure out.”

That, mind, not from some no-nothing suit who has never picked up a bat or ball but from someone who played 116 Tests, 196 ODIs and 33 T20Is for South Africa, captained them 284 times, and scored 17,224 runs for them. Smith is the most South African of South Africa’s players; past present and, probably, future. If you cut him, does he not bleed green?

But here he is, the epitome of the traditional game in his country, fronting the antithesis of all that — which some people still think, despite all evidence to the contrary, is what’s most important in cricket. “These bloody leagues,” one senior South African administrator called the new order. You wonder how they deal with the cognitive dissonance.

You also wonder how international cricket’s increasingly sad and deluded apologists haven’t realised that they’re on their own.

Cricbuzz

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