“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.
Cricbuzz
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