No Banquo in CSA’s Macbeth

“The entire board should be fired or dissolved for rubbishing CSA’s brand.” – Gauteng president Jack Madiseng

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

SOME of Thabang Moroe’s best friends are Cricket South Africa (CSA) board members. That remains true even as pressure, from inside and outside the organisation, mounts on the under fire chief executive to resign.

But the previously strong bond between Moroe and CSA’s president, Chris Nenzani, has been broken. Now Moroe’s remaining allies on the board are taking aim at Nenzani for the mess the game is in. That is hardly surprising considering other alliances will need to be strengthened before Nenzani, having overstayed his welcome by a year, vacates his position in 2020. Even so, it offers an illuminating twist on a narrative that has hitherto dumped all the ills on Moroe’s desk.     

There was more of that, although nudged in the board’s direction, in the letter Mohamed Iqbal Khan wrote to Nenzani on Wednesday to resign from CSA’s board: “The criticism in the media, and by the public who love and support cricket, has reached such a crescendo that I can no longer be deaf to the cries for immediate changes at CSA board level. Before … Shirley Zinn resigned [from the board this week], I still maintained that I would give things a chance, and wait until at least Saturday [when a board meeting is scheduled] for us to address the deep crisis we find ourselves in. I seriously doubt however that you and/or the board is capable of doing so, and in the circumstances, I have reached the only conclusion, and that is that I must resign my position on the board as well as my position as chairperson of the CSA finance committee.” Khan wrote that, “Unfortunately, all the fingers point at the CEO. But having said that, I cannot believe that you are not aware of the many issues that have caused this malaise, and to that extent, you are also complicit, and perhaps even the entire board. However, I can no longer be party to an organisation that is fast ruining the game. … I can no longer afford to be held accountable for the misconduct of the CEO. If I continue one day further as a member of the board, I will become an accomplice to what the CEO has done, and is doing.”

Khan slammed Sunday’s decision, rescinded six hours later, to revoke the accreditation of five senior journalists as “certainly unconstitutional and illegal” and said “blaming the head of communications [Thamie Mthembu] for mis-communicating or failing to communicate effectively with the media when he is ultimately responsible for such communication”. He damned Moroe further with “… if the CEO is or was not aware of what is happening in his office, then this aggravates his conduct”. Khan also alleged, among other issues, “several resignations in the CSA office due to what they claim is a legally toxic environment”, “widespread credit card abuse in the office”, and “very selective communication with SACA [the South African Cricketers’ Association, who on Wednesday threatened strike action], and a failure to engage with them in terms of the CSA collective agreement with SACA”.

Khan’s strong statements are being widely reported, less so that he is apparently being investigated by CSA’s ethics structures over a potential conflict of interest — his professional superior is Mustaq Ahmed Brey, who sits on the board of the Western Province Cricket Association (WPCA). Another member of the latter, Fagmeedah Petersen-Cook, formerly of the Gauteng board, posted on social media: “Jack Madiseng positioning himself for CSA presidency? As guilty as all the non-independents in the patronage network. I resigned as lead independent at Gauteng because of his behaviour.”

That brings us, admittedly not before time, to Moroe’s remaining allies, his rift with Nenzani, and what needs to happen in the coming months to keep power in South African cricket where it is now. In a letter to Nenzani and his vice-president, Beresford Williams, dated November 29, Madiseng, the Gauteng president and a member of the CSA board who has recently been made chair of the influential cricket committee, mounted a strong defence of Moroe — which meant attacking the lame duck Nenzani and his deputy. “I would like to exercise my fiduciary duty as a board member of CSA and express my disappointment at both of you for the poor or lack of leadership that we find our brand in,” Madiseng wrote. “I could have taken an easy path and resigned. Fortunately, I have mentors and guides that have advised me to be part of the change and solution at CSA. So I decided to act responsibly as a member of this board and bring the concerns stipulated below for your attention. … The poor CEO has been getting all the klaps [slaps] and punches from the media and the public without the presence of the CSA leadership, which is both of you. Let me unpack a couple of examples … to demonstrate your poor or non-visible leadership which has led to the excruciating and bad personal brand reputation of our CEO.” Whereupon Madiseng launched into critiques of the breakdown of CSA’s relationship with the WPCA, the ongoing delay in making key appointments, a slew of high-level suspensions, transformation issues, and a domestic restructure that could cost 70 players their jobs. “The leadership was nowhere to be found; non-existent and non-visible. The operational team [Moroe and his staff] is all alone. … My expectation was for both of you [Nenzani and Williams] to take the leadership and face the music on behalf of the board and executive team. It didn’t happen. … Kudos to the CEO and his executive for having the balls to take such astronomical and damaging reports from the public and media. … Your non-visibility gave the media and the public a perception that the CEO unilaterally makes all the decisions, which is not true. We all know that the CEO can’t act without a mandate from both of you. I hold ourselves (the board) accountable and not the CEO and his executive team. … If someone had to be fired or dismissed, in all honesty, the entire board should be fired or dissolved for rubbishing CSA’s brand.” It is true that turkeys do not vote for Christmas, but it is just as true that the turkeys who run South African cricket are a special breed. Madiseng says the only response he has had to his letter is a “defensive call from the leadership”, and that despite him following it up with “a reminder which fell on deaf ears”.  

Madiseng followed Moroe as Gauteng president, and Moroe was CSA’s vice-president before being appointed their chief executive. The alliance between the two men runs deep, and its logical next level would be for Madiseng to succeed Nenzani as CSA president next year. Hence the conscious loosening of the ties between Moroe and the now expendable Nenzani. Williams will likely be Madiseng’s opponent in the coming fight. But, for that plan to come together, Moroe needs to keep his job — which is by no means certain what with figures of the stature of Ali Bacher, a known confidante of Moroe, now saying he should go.

In a statement on Thursday, the Willowton Group, whose Sunfoil subsidiary has in the past been a major CSA sponsor and still supports the game, added their voice to what Khan rightly called a crescendo. The company called for the “immediate resignation of the CEO”, the “immediate resignation of the president”, the “immediate reinstatement of the three suspended CSA officials [chief operating officer Naasei Appiah, interim director of cricket Corrie van Zyl, and sales and sponsorship head Clive Eksteen]” the “immediate reappointment of the two board members who have resigned”, the “immediate appointment of a lead independent director”, and an “immediate independent audit and review”.

That’s a lot of immediacy, and some of it may indeed happen soon enough. CSA have scheduled a board meeting for Saturday, which is to be followed by a press conference. Not since Hansie Cronjé and all that has a South African cricket gathering been so keenly anticipated. A drama of Macbethian proportions is sweeping across the stage. With a difference: there is no Banquo because there are no good guys.

First published by Cricbuzz.

SA v England: The Crisis Cup

Great cricket can be forged in these circumstances. Struggles of the spirit are always stirring, even though they are not always pretty.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

RUSSELL Domingo couldn’t look sheepish if he tried. Not that he did try as he sat down behind the microphones at Sodden Park on March 29, 2017. Apologies: that should read Seddon Park. Perhaps not. All around, Hamilton was indeed sodden. Rain that had woken Kane Williamson at 4am had continued to fall for several more hours: “I was sort of hoping that it might stop or it might come a little early and fine up.”

Domingo harboured no such hope. “Today the weather was great,” South Africa’s then men’s team coach said through a wide grin, as well he might have. His team were to have resumed on the last day still 95 runs shy of making New Zealand bat again, and with Dean Elgar, Theunis de Bruyn, Hashim Amla, JP Duminy and Temba Bavuma already removed from the equation. Faf du Plessis and Quinton de Kock had made decent starts and were still around, but Matt Henry, Colin de Grandhomme or Neil Wagner, or indeed Jeetan Patel or Mitchell Santner, would surely have dismissed at least one of them and ripped through the rest: Vernon Philander, Keshav Maharaj, Morné Morkel and Kagiso Rabada. We will never know. At 1.20pm Bruce Oxenford and Rod Tucker pulled the plug and allowed all that water to drain away without further consequence for the cricket. Not only did the rain save South Africa from defeat, it also sealed a 1-0 series victory.

Two years on at sodden again Seddon Park it was Williamson’s turn to look sheepish, which he does without trying at the best of times. “A lot of hard work had to go into saving the match when time didn’t allow us an opportunity to win it,” he said on Tuesday after rain limited the fifth day’s play in the second Test against England to 41 overs. New Zealand had resumed their second innings five runs behind and with eight wickets standing, and thanks to centuries by Williamson and Ross Taylor they had a lead of 140 for no further loss when the weather decided the issue. Like Williamson said, the match wasn’t there for the winning. But the draw meant the home side, who won the first Test in Mount Maunganui by an innings, claimed the series.

Cue English angst. Joe Root’s team have won only four of their 11 Tests this year, and half of those successes were achieved against lightweights West Indies and Ireland. For the first time since 1999 England will finish a year without having won a rubber. Here in sunny South Africa, where England are to start a series at Centurion on December 26, we can hear their pasty, pallid stomachs churning. No team in cricket overthinks as chronically as England, a tendency evidenced not only by the fact that they have capped 695 players — Australia, the other original Test side, have handed out only 458 Baggy Greens — but also by the oddity that as many as 96 of them have had just one Test. England are not helped by a powerful press that is easily reduced to overweening nit-picking to stoke the rivalry between publications. Incidents like Joe Denly’s dropped catch at Seddon Park this week take on a media life of their own that bears no relation to their actual importance. Conversely, relatively little light has been shed on the unarguable truth that no the match played at Lord’s on July 14 was neither won nor lost. That would expose the flaws in the dominant narrative that England triumphed in the World Cup. More legitimately, fellow finalists New Zealand tripped on a technicality.

Cricket is not immune from society’s wider issues, so the poisoned politics of the Brexit debate have been seen in, for instance, the opposition to Jofra Archer’s first selection, which came even from his fellow players. You won’t, of course, hear a peep of it now that he’s a star. The other extreme is the disproportionate reaction to one spectator targetting Archer with racist verbal abuse during the first Test, which became a convenient shield against criticism for the thrashing England endured. It hasn’t helped resolve the issue that the perpetrator has yet to be identified, even that in one of the most civilised countries on the planet. Human rights abuses are treated significantly more seriously in New Zealand than in England, where racism is a daily reality for millions. But, to read the ongoing coverage of the Archer issue in the aghast English press, you would think he lives in paradise — not a country built, still, on the proceeds of slavery and colonialism. And that despite most of those publications belonging to a right wing cabal that punches downward with impunity in its coverage of immigration and cultural differences. 

The navel-gazers from the north will bring all that baggage with them to South Africa in the coming weeks. They will find a game in turmoil. Ructions at board level and an embattled operational arm are bad enough, but matters would get exponentially worse should the players follow through on the threat made in a release from the South African Cricketers’ Association (SACA) on Wednesday, which said the organisation would meet on Friday. “This discussion is likely to include the possibility of the players taking some form of industrial, or protest, action,” Tony Irish, SACA’s chief executive, was quoted as saying. “SACA has always considered strike, and other similar forms of industrial action, to be a very last resort and in SACA’s 17 years of dealing with CSA to date not one day of cricket has ever been lost to industrial action. However things have now reached a stage where we must ask what SACA, and the players, are expected to do when the leadership of CSA, both operationally and on its board, continues to ignore our legitimate concerns and refuses to acknowledge the players as key stakeholders in the game.” 

Key though they are, South Africa’s players are under heightened pressure to perform. They followed a poor 2019 World Cup with an even more unconvincing Test series in India. Du Plessis went to the World Cup as, South Africans would argue, cricket’s finest captain. A few months on, his beard visibly greyer, his eyes sunken with the special weariness of the worried, he looks like a husk of the man he was. Rabada has lost the spark he had when he was the adolescent prodigy of a South Africa attack that now looks to him for the solid, dull thud, day in and day out, of seniority. The leaden weight of that mantle can be measured by the giddy happiness that Dale Steyn, who has given it up, has found bowling in the backyard cricket that is the Mzansi Super League. With Amla and AB de Villiers gone, taking with them much of their team’s originality at the crease, and Aiden Markram’s poorly aimed punch at a wall in Pune in October likely to rule him out for at least part of the England series, South Africa’s batting is at its lowest ebb. Du Plessis is a man for days like these, as are Elgar and Bavuma. But who will look up to see the sky if the pillars of the order keep their gaze fixed deep in the trenches?

South Africa and England play for the Basil D’Oliveira Trophy, but this time their prize should be called the Crisis Cup. The winners will be those who limp out of the series alive, who find a way to overcome the odds stacked against them. This will be a celebration not of talent and skill but of survival. Great cricket can be forged in these circumstances: struggles of the spirit are always stirring, even though they are not always pretty. Domingo fought that battle for his entire tenure, even when no-one was fighting back. As South Africa’s first black coach and without the laurels of a playing career to rest on, he knew no other way. Maybe that’s why he seemed at his happiest in the dreariness of a rainy day in Hamilton two years ago. He couldn’t have known it then, but that marked the last time South Africa earned success in an away series. Since then they have won exactly half and lost the rest of the 24 Tests they have played. They have, then, been treading water. Now it’s sink or swim.

First published by Cricbuzz.

WPCA board win legal battle with CSA

Arbitration case won with costs

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

THE Western Province Cricket Association (WPCA) board have won their arbitration case against Cricket South Africa (CSA).

That should mean the WPCA board, who were put under administration by CSA in September, will be re-instated — but CSA could challenge the decision.

“My lawyers have just called me and told me we have won the arbitration with costs,” WPCA president Nic Kock told TMG Digital.

Kock, an advocate, said he would study the finding closely before commenting further.

Another official said CSA’s legal team were considering their options, which could include taking the case on review.

CSA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In a decision announced on September 22, CSA took control of the WPCA’s board because of disagreements over a major construction project at Newlands.

CSA cited spectator safety concerns for the move, but it is believed poor communication between WPCA and CSA played a role in the impasse.

The project could be worth up to R800-million when complete, and would make the WPCA significantly less financially dependent on CSA.

But, to get it built, the WPCA needed to borrow R81-million from CSA — who have since called in the loan.

Although the WPCA’s board are not currently in control of the province’s affairs — CSA appointed former WPCA chief executive André Odendaal as administrator — day-to-day business proceeded as normal with current WPCA chief executive Nabeal Dien at the helm.

That has meant Newlands remains on track to host the second Test against England, which starts on January 3.

CSA are also fighting on another legal front — the South African Cricketers’ Association have launched a High Court action over a plan to restructure the domestic game that could see up to 70 professional players lose their jobs.

First published by TMG Digital.

Leading Edge: Why it’s hard to like the MSL

Thabang Moroe is fast becoming the Donald Trump of sports administrators. Everything he touches turns to chaos.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

“STAND back,” Adam says to Eve with a loinward glance. “I don’t know how big this thing gets.” You could tell the same joke about cricket in SA. In reverse.

Just how small can the game get in our country? It’s a question asked with concern and sadness, and not a little anger, in the wake of another few days of self-inflicted organisational damage in the scrapyard Cricket SA (CSA) seems determined to become.

Rather than drag the Mzansi Super League (MSL) onto the SABC’s screens from Friday, CSA would do better to offer for broadcast the footage from whatever cameras they have in their offices.

The state broadcaster loves a tawdry soap opera, and CSA’s brand of unreality television would grip the nation far more readily than their comparatively dowdy donkey of a T20 tournament.

CSA have finally coughed up the R2.4-million they owed the players from last year’s MSL for the use of their commercial rights.

Sounds like good news. Sort of. Except that the SA Cricketers’ Association (SACA) had to go to the lengths of lodging a formal dispute — and forcing a settlement that had to be paid in three days — to get their money.

Sounds bad enough. Except that CSA made things worse by suspending three of their most senior administrators in an apparent attempt to lay blame for what had gone wrong.

Sounds worrying enough. Except that SACA gave cricketminded South Africans an idea of how much more they should be worried by saying they hadn’t dealt with one of the suspended officials and that the other two had been helping them resolve the issue.

Sounds worse than we thought. Except that it’s even worse. CSA have not, we hear, explained to at least two of the officials their reasons for taking action against them. The suspendees, having been shot in this movie before, have “covered their backsides on this internally”, according to a solid source. Consequently the officials’ “lawyers are all over it”.

SACA made clear that, rather than the three suspended suits, the focus of their frustration was CSA chief executive Thabang Moroe, who is fast becoming the Donald Trump of sports administrators in the public eye. As in it seems everything he touches turns to chaos.

And all that while CSA are trying to get their remaining major sponsors, Standard Bank and Momentum, to sign new deals for more of the same.  

What would you do, gentle reader, if you had heaped all this trouble on your own head?

How about high tail it to beautiful, peaceful, luxurious, expensive Zimbali for the weekend?

No! Yes. CSA have taken their staff off to the larney coastal resort north of Durban for a “team-building session”. How much team-building can you do when most of the people in the room work under the managers you have suspended?

But wait. There’s more. On Friday CSA released a statement that included a farcical assurance that “while the management deals with corporate issues around operational functions that are normal in organisations from time to time” the money-bleeding MSL would go ahead as scheduled. Then came the cryptic line: “To dispel any uncertainty, a schedule of the opening matches is included, as well as a list of all the players, who have already been drafted and are eagerly anticipating the tournament.”

Who knew there was any uncertainty to dispel about the MSL? So CSA had to be asked whether the tournament was in danger of being called off, prompted entirely by their own suggestion that the theory was out there that the plug could yet be pulled.

A spokesperson couldn’t see the problem: “I re-read it and to me it simply sounds like an intention to reassure cricket fans that they have a date with MSL. Our responsibility is to the fans of cricket and the lovers of cricket, whom we cannot disappoint.”

The MSL could have been a Garden of Eden for a society that too often gets snagged on horror headlines about vicious crime and a failing economy.

Instead it represents everything that is wrong with SA cricket. Its innocence has been wasted. We’ve bitten into the apple of reality. We know too much to enjoy it.

First published by the Sunday Times.

CSA sink deeper into trouble with players

“We have been trying to resolve this with CSA for many months but have now reached the point where formal steps have to be taken as players remain out of pocket.” – SACA chief executive Tony Irish

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

CRICKET South Africa (CSA) are in more trouble with their lifeblood: the players.

Already being dragged to court over a proposed domestic structure that could cost 70 professional cricketers their jobs, CSA now face demands from the players to settle an unpaid bill from last year’s Mzansi Super League (MSL).

It’s not a good week for the game, what with the men’s Test squad on their way back from India having delivered their worst performance in 83 years.

The South African Cricketers’ Association (SACA) said in a release on Wednesday that they had lodged a formal dispute related to a breach of an agreement, signed last November, that granted CSA use of the players’ commercial rights for the MSL.

The price, TMG Digital has learnt, was R2.4-million, which was to have been paid into SACA’s players’ trust.

“Unfortunately CSA has persistently refused to pay an agreed amount relating to the use of the players commercial rights, and consequently the players have yet to be paid for these,” the release quoted SACA chief executive Tony Irish as saying.

“This has occurred despite CSA having benefited from the use of the rights in last year’s MSL.

“We have been trying to resolve this with CSA for many months but have now reached the point where formal steps have to be taken as players remain out of pocket.”

The saga will now move through a mediation and arbitration process. The latter is binding, so a player strike is unlikely.

On the other front, SACA’s high court action, launched in May, hasn’t made much progress.

“In normal circumstances one would have expected the court application to be heard in or around October this year,” Irish was quoted as saying.

“However failures on the part of CSA to comply with the time periods provided for in the rules of court have led to unnecessary delays.

“CSA also failed to respond for a long period to attempts to establish a process aimed at resolving the issues around the domestic restructure. All of this has obviously been very frustrating for SACA and it creates uncertainty for the players.”

SACA, Irish was at pains to point out, hadn’t been overly keen to call their lawyers.

“SACA remains committed to the court application as this is necessary to deal with CSA’s decision to unilaterally impose a new domestic structure on the players without consultation and in clear breach of signed agreements between SACA and CSA.

“This imposed structure, if allowed, would lead to a very significant number of provincial players losing their careers as professional cricketers and it would also give rise to the likelihood of substantial cuts in the earnings and benefits of franchises players.

“In addition we believe that it will weaken the standard of our top flight domestic cricket across playing formats, at a time when we can ill afford to do this.”

South Africa were thrashed by an innings for the second consecutive time by India in Ranchi on Tuesday, the first time they have sunk so low since 1936.

CSA, who SACA estimate could record losses of up to R1-billion by the end of the 2022 rights cycle, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

First published by TMG Digital.

Sharks circle SA cricket

How can South Africa’s logic vacuum not affect Faf du Plessis and his team?

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

IF a fish rots from the head, the fish that is South Africa’s men’s team limping home across the Indian Ocean on one battered fin is cursed with a rotting head at each end.

At one end, the damage caused by a bumptiously aggressive, arrogant administration that wouldn’t know reality if it smacked it upside the head with — as we say here on the sharp tip of Africa — a wet fish.

At the other end, the hurt of a broken bunch of players who, in the wake of South Africa’s worst performance in a series in living memory, could use some aggression or even arrogance and have had far too much reality for their own good.

India has been the undoing of many of cricket’s finest teams. This South Africa side, wounded by the still fresh retirements of Hashim Amla and Dale Steyn, and with the scars left by the excision of AB de Villiers and Morné Morkel yet to heal, was not among the best.

But they should have done better than become the first South Africa team to suffer innings defeats in consecutive matches since 1936.

India dominated every aspect of the series to such an extent that the South Africans didn’t know where to look. Not that they knew beforehand.

If they gazed upward they saw those bilious board members and execrable executives cheerfully chugging their way through another few million in losses. If they cast their eyes downward they saw a domestic system dangerously eroded by the inexorable exodus of players and coaches.

The South African Cricketers’ Association (SACA), the country’s professional player body, estimates Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) losses will amount to around US$6.8-million by the end of the 2022 rights cycle. We know this because the figure is in the court papers for the legal action SACA are taking against CSA over a plan to restructure the domestic game that will double the number of teams in the top flight, which, perversely, could lead to 70 players losing their jobs.

And yet CSA are blithely — or even blindly — lurching ahead with planning for the second edition of the Mzansi Super League (MSL), the T20 competition in which money flows down the drain faster than runs hit the scoreboard.

How can that kind of logic vacuum not have an effect on Faf du Plessis and his team? If the people who call themselves the custodians of the game don’t have enough custodial sense between them to recognise the MSL for what it is — a terrible, wasteful, stupid idea — what right do they have to hold the players to a competent standard?

It is no longer even a mild surprise when a prominent player abandons their dream of making it at international level in favour of a Kolpak contract or moving to England, New Zealand or Australia. The surprise is that more have not gone that route. Yet. Now coaches are following their lead. Even administrators — the better ones — are jumping ship.

Cricket is as much at the mercy of a weak currency as every other industry in South Africa, a challenge not eased by the endemic corruption at the highest levels of a society that once gave the world reason to believe evil could be conquered.

But Nelson Mandela is dead, as is South Africa’s hope for a future in which the legacy of apartheid has ceased to be the everyday reality for millions of its citizens.

Infect that already poisoned scenario with a middle class that refuses to see the cruel folly of the assumption that the privilege it was born into is its right, and it isn’t difficult to understand why the country is shambling towards becoming a failed state in which a good day is when the power company sticks to the schedule of rolling blackouts.

That same middle class claims cricket as its cultural property, a beacon of its superiority over the common masses, the great unwashed, the dreaded Them. You know — soccer people.

Efforts to right the wrongs of the past are sneered at by people who don’t want to know, or have wilfully forgotten, that South Africa have never chosen their cricket teams on merit. For the first 103 of their 108 years as a Test-playing nation — not considering the 22 years of their isolation — the quota was 11 white players.

Attempts to undo that crippling disadvantage have not succeeded nearly as well as hoped, and have indeed damaged the cause by sewing doubt and suspicion: proof of how debilitating the past was for the game.

This thing runs deep down our country’s roots, far further than the turf under a cricket pitch and into the gold mines themselves. Where there is money to be made there is badness to be done, and there was a lot of money to be made in South Africa. Hence a lot of badness was delivered in the form of brutal laws enforced by murderous authorities.

Apartheid still stinks in South Africa’s streets: in those where black people endure life with hardly any delivery of the services the politicians they vote for — in decreasing numbers — promise to provide, as well as in the streets that gleam with affluence where the few black people to be seen are gardeners and maids.

The other edge of the sword of South Africa’s inequality between rich and poor, which the World Bank has estimated to be the worst in the world, is the greed and cynicism that lurks to exploit that gap for all its worth. How difficult is it to tell poor people they should be angry with their lot, and that they should take out their frustrations on those even worse off than them?   

Welcome, South African cricket, to all that. Actually, the game has been central to all that for as long as it’s been in South Africa. It arrived as part of the colonial experiment, was nudged into the post-colonial experiment, and then subverted into the mythology of the apartheid experiment. Now it is a small but visible part of the pseudo-democratic present, a minnow in an ever-shrinking pond.

“Being a fish out of water is tough, but that’s how you evolve,” Kumail Nanjiani, the Pakistani-American comedian, said.

Or you become a casualty of evolution; a victim of bigger, stronger but not necessarily better forces. If you’re limping home on one battered fin, both your heads rotting, good luck surviving the sharks.

First published by firstpost.com — https://www.firstpost.com/firstcricket/sports-news/india-vs-south-africa-proteas-cricketing-freefall-an-apt-reflection-of-countrys-socio-economic-crises-and-administrative-apathy-7540391.html

CSA try to spin positives into T20GL owners’ anger

“We are still stakeholders; I still have my rights. I’m not going to negotiate anything different.” – Ajay Sethi, Nelson Mandela Bay Stars owner

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Lisbon

T20 Global League (T20GL) franchise owners have been telling Cricket South Africa (CSA) for weeks now how unhappy they are with them.

But, if a release CSA issued on Friday is to be taken seriously, the suits haven’t noticed. 

Charges like “absolutely disgruntled”, “disappointing and unprofessional” and “unethical” have been tossed the board’s way by four of the eight owners, amid threats of legal action.

The franchisees have slammed the board for planning to minimise their involvement in the tournament, which was to have been played last November and December but was postponed and is set to be relaunched this year.

But things have changed: the owners have been refunded their deposits and the competition is now owned by CSA and SuperSport.

That has angered the T20GL owners, but you wouldn’t have thought so from a statement CSA released on Friday.

“CSA has welcomed the interest shown by former franchise holders of the defunct T20GL to be involved in CSA’s new franchise-based T20 competition,” the statement begins.

It then quotes acting chief executive Thabang Moroe as saying: “The fact that they want to be part of it is an encouraging response, and this confirms that they believe, as we indeed do, that our new T20 is a good product that compares with the best international standards.

“At the same time it is essential that we follow process in the development of our T20 strategy, which in the first place required us to resolve the outstanding issues from last year.

“As has been well documented, the key to the postponement was the inability to secure key stakeholders and revenue streams. We have now secured a broadcasting equity partner and are currently engaging potential sponsors.

“Once those parties are secured as a collective the business plan will be finalised.

“We will then be in a position to clarify what we can propose and offer to other stakeholders.”

In response Ajay Sethi, the owner of the Nelson Mandela Bay Stars, offered a handshake that became a two-fingered salute.  

“We welcome their statement but we want to get something in writing from them,” Sethi told TMG Digital. “We are very happy to meet with them.”

Told that CSA seemed to regard him and the other owners as the debris of a failed experiment — “former franchise holders of the defunct T20GL” has a ring of dismissive finality about it — Sethi sounded a defiant note.

“We are still stakeholders; I still have my rights. I’m not going to negotiate anything different.”

CSA also managed to say something less ludicrous on Friday in the shape of an agreed delay of one week in the finalising of their memorandum of understanding with the South African Cricketers’ Association (SACA).

The MOU governs the relationship between the board and the players in much the same way as employers and trade unions deal with each other.

Uncertainty over a replacement for the four-year agreement that expired at the end of April, and a worryingly aggressive stance taken by CSA, led to fears of players being out of contract, going on strike, or ditching cricket to find other sources of income.

An interim deal was struck, and it seems as if someone has since spoken some sense.

“Negotiations have taken place in a positive and constructive spirit, but it is important that the drafting process is very thorough as it covers virtually every aspect of professional cricket for both men and women over the next four years, involving not just CSA and SACA but the franchises and provinces as well,” another statement quoted Moroe as saying.

SACA chief executive Tony Irish was quoted as saying: “A lot of progress has been made since CSA and SACA signed an interim agreement at the end of April and we have consensus on virtually all of the key aspects.

“We are now in the drafting process and have set ourselves a revised joint target of July 6 to complete that and sign the agreements.”

These are strange days indeed if a delay is good news, and it is.