UK – Bulletproof Truth

The queen is dead, long live the pub

“Damn. On a random Thursday …” — one reaction to Queen Elizabeth II’s death.

Telford Vice / London

THE United Kingdom stopped to honour their queen for as long as it took to play the national anthem, and for a sombre man on the BBC to tell them she was dead. In other words, for maybe a minute. Then the pints started to be poured again.

A pub snug by the Thames in south London is perhaps not the best place to judge the national mood in the wake of the demise of a monarch who has sat on her throne for 70 years. Or perhaps it is exactly the right place to tell us that the British — those who live in the nation’s capital at least — have outgrown the need for what has become little more of a tourist attraction. To others, it is the end of an era of certainty and stability. To still others, it is the death of nostalgia itself.

To another category of Brit, it’s hardly news. “Ninety-six-year-old woman dies? It’s up there with dog bites man, innit,” one of the pub’s denizens said. Someone significantly younger working at the Oval, where the deciding third Test between England and South Africa will not resume until Saturday at the earliest, quipped with cutting simplicity: “Damn. On a random Thursday …”

The cruel truth is that Elizabeth’s death has been 70 years in the making. All in one tweet, the Royal family’s blue-ticked account said: “The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon. The King and The Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow.” And that was that. They didn’t even bother using all of the available 280 characters. Thanks for coming, Liz. Don’t forget to leave your crown at the door.

Doubtless she will be mourned in grandiose style in public in the coming days. There’s nothing the British do quite as well as public emotion, whether they’re cheering for their football teams, supergluing themselves to roadways during protests, or bidding farewell to the only constant in their lives. Pomp and circumstance, they call it.

But are the real people in this complicated country — the urban elite, the rural ranks, the Conservatives and the Labourites, the bosses and the trade unionists, the Leavers and Remainers, the colonisers and the colonised — ready for King Charles III? It is an irrelevant question because he’s coming, ready or not. In fact, he’s already here. Besides, there is that most British of things to consider: a queue. Behind Charles, William is already having his head measured for a crown.

But, for longer than most of the population of the UK as well as that of many other countries, the queen and what she represents has held sway over their lives to a greater or lesser degree. She has, it’s difficult to deny, been the figurehead for decisions on the language they speak, their system of government, their debt, and their relationship with the wider world.

They should know that the British aren’t taking this too badly. Maybe that’s just what it means to live in a country where things work — the lights stay on, women walk the streets alone at night fairly confident they will be safe, and there is a semblance of equality (or at least far more than in viciously skewed societies like South Africa’s). The queen is dead? Who cares? Someone will be around to make sure everything is alright. Keep calm and order another pint.

That’s exactly what happened in that pub snug by the Thames. The television stayed tuned to the story, the footage showing hordes gathering in the rain outside Buckingham Palace. But the sound was turned off in preference for some or other flavour of muzak, and the show went on. Mine’s a hazy IPA. What are you having?

The ghoulish jokes weren’t long in coming. What if Boris Johnson’s last act as prime minister and Liz Truss’ first achievement in the job was to give the queen a fatal dose of Covid when they visited her at Balmoral on Tuesday to, respectively, resign the position and be invited to form a new government? The code the PM would have been given when Elizabeth died was “London Bridge is down.” Whereupon Liz, the punchline went, would have said, “What are you on about? I can see it from my office and it’s perfectly fine.”

But the joke is on the UK itself. In 1977 the Sex Pistols sang, “God save the queen, she ain’t no human being. There is no future in England’s dreaming.” By 2017, John Lydon, the frontman for the world’s most prominent punk band, had revised that opinion to, “She’s a human being and I will sorely miss her as a human being on planet Earth… It’s not her fault she was born into a gilded cage. Long may she live.”

In 1986 the Smiths brought out an album called, The Queen is Dead. Here are the first two verses of the title track: “Farewell to this land’s cheerless marshes / Hemmed in like a boar between archers / Her very Lowness with her head in a sling / I’m truly sorry, but it sounds like a wonderful thing / ‘I say, Charles, don’t you ever crave / To appear on the front of the Daily Mail / Dressed in your Mother’s bridal veil?” Ooh, ooh, ooh … And so I checked all the registered historical facts / And I was shocked into shame to discover / How I’m the 18th pale descendant of some old queen or other. ”

By 2019, Morrissey, who sang those words to millions of adoring anti-royalists and mere republicans, had re-invented himself as a target for criticism for his views slammed for a stream of consciousness that didn’t seem to extend beyond misogyny and racism.

At least Lydon and Morrissey once held convictions that bore scrutiny and asked difficult questions that needed answering, then as now. The generations they have given sway to seem to have forgotten how to care, in all sorts of ways. Let the pints pour.

First published by Daily Maverick.

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Welcome, English cricket, to the real world

“Inglan is a bitch.” – Linton Kwesi Johnson

Telford Vice | Cape Town

Even in Bethnal Green, which is among the more unsubtle parts of London’s distinctly unsubtle East End, and even on the side of a parked delivery truck that had been scarred by all manner of graffiti, the words stuck out. “Fuck da Africans”. The hate wasn’t only in the message, but also in the messaging: short, fat, black stabs of paint formed the blockish letters. What visceral anger, what abhorrence, it must have taken to do this like that.

Less than a minute’s walk away at a line of street stalls hundreds of metres long, all of them staffed by Bengalis, you could buy anything from a hairpin to, probably, a helicopter. On your third visit to the Pakistani takeaway nearby, the man behind the counter pops your “three naan for £1” into a bag with a smile before you reach the counter. The Afghan butcher two doors down is only too happy to slice up any cut of meat you like any way you like. The English butcher further along the street offers, in season, whole pheasant; head, feet, feathers and all, staring at you with dull, defeated eyes.

Across the road at the local supermarket, the checkout staff are the most charming people in the world. One of them — matronly, wearing hijab — hands over your change with a warm, “Thanks babes.” Another, a wizened, dreadlocked Jamaican whose name tag reads “Cecily” never let’s you go without delivering a lecture on life: “Now then young man, stay away from the devil of drink …”

As you step outside, a gruff, unkempt old bloke apparently of eastern European origin is barking at a young, overtly English-looking white woman and pointing: “There! There! Your pocket!” She looks down and sees she is about to lose a pair of earphones.

Around the corner, Jamaal, a Tunisian barber, thinks in Arabic and French and tells lurid stories in the most exquisitely fractured English about the boxers, cab drivers and gangster associates who have sat in the same chair where you are now having your hair cut.

Not far from here is St John on Bethnal Green, an Anglican Church where, on Friday evenings, you can hear the Grand Union Orchestra wend their way through wondrous jam sessions. The house band comprises musicians from South Africa — trumpeter and percussionist Claude Deppa, who played with Miriam Makeba — Australia and England. Guest stars include Bangladeshi tabla master Yousuf Ali Khan, Chilean multi-instrumentalist Carlos Fuentes, Somalian oud virtuoso Mohammed Maalow Nuur, Zhu Xiao Meng, an expert on the gu zheng, or Chinese harp, and cellist and singer Kate Shortt, who tells the rich stories of the East End’s Jewish diaspora. And all that for the price of even the smallest cash donation.

You can contribute separately to the church coffers by buying a beer from the rector himself. The Reverend Prebendary Alan Green, on these occasions usually dressed in priestly collar and blue jeans, knows his India Pale Ale from his saison. There can be nothing so deliciously subversive as sitting in a pew holding a pint, with the vicar’s blessing.

Bethnal Green was home for 15 months in 2018 and ’19. London was, on the whole, dirty, cold, expensive and unfriendly. Bethnal Green was dirty, cold and expensive, but far from unfriendly. For a white South African, it was strange to live in a white majority country for the first time. But doing so in an area where the majority are black and brown made it feel something like normal. Not that being born and raised in the bosom of the privileges afforded by white supremacy anywhere, much less in Africa, can be confused, in any way, with normality. Life in Bethnal Green added a fascinating dimension to all that.

“Fuck da Africans”? Here? Really? Yes. Here. Really. We knew this before Azeem Rafiq told us his cricket career had been stolen from him by racism. Rather, by racists lurking in his own dressing room. Because, without racists to fuel it, racism is a fire without flames and will soon die. This, too, we know. And have done for centuries. That Rafiq has himself been implicated for an anti-semitic exchange of text messages does not repudiate his story. This rings the alarm still louder: the disease infects those it afflicts in multiple senses. The victims of racism can also be perpetrators.

So it was shocking and horrifying that the UK parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, to whom Rafiq spoke of his experiences last Tuesday, should have been shocked and horrified to hear there was racism in English cricket. It didn’t help that every member of the committee was achingly pale. Neither did it help that, not for the first time and, sadly, no doubt not the last, it fell to someone who is not white to lay bare to whites the depths of despair caused, intentionally, by a system created by and for whites — particularly white men of means — at the expense of everyone else.

Did the committee think cricket was exempt from racism? Did they think the UK itself was free of this evil? Did they think it was all in the past, so why don’t we all just move on? All of the above? It’s possible, even probable.

UK society is shot through with denial of the fact that it is built on racism. That Britain was central to the Atlantic slave trade is lost in the afterglow of praise for its decision to scrap slavery — which was only achieved on the back of an agreement to pay enslavers millions in compensation. When slavery died, colonialism lived on in rude health. But the British cling, despite all the truth that has been exposed of the murderous ugliness of their history, to notions of empire.

They have elected a racist buffoon, Boris Johnson, to lead them. He has cast himself as the modern version of a drunk, bankrupt, racist buffoon from another age, Winston Churchill. In the streets near the bad mother of all parliaments, neo-fascists have pledged to stop Churchill’s statue from being torn off its plinth by those who are fed up with him being lauded as a hero.

Maybe all this is to be expected from people who are so xenophobic they voted to leave the European Union, perhaps the most successful gathering of cultures in world history. Do they understand how Orwellian they sound when they bleat, “We must end freedom of movement!”? Do they not get the sick irony of being displeased about people turning up unannounced on their shores when the British themselves did exactly that for hundreds of years? And conquered as they went. And then asked people from those countries to come and help rebuild Britain after a war? Only to tell them, decades of hard work and taxes later, that their presence was “illegal”? As Jamaican poet Linton Kwezi Johnson has been saying since 1980, “Inglan is a bitch.”

So there was something offensively funny about many UK newspapers splashing Rafiq and his story across their front pages on Wednesday. Because the press is part of the problem. With the exceptions of The Guardian, The Observer and The Mirror, the major papers are right-wing platforms that either dog-whistle or blatantly tub-thump for the glorious days of empire and colonialism. They were powerful enablers of the Brexit vote and Johnson’s election, and they continue to prop up the dangerous and damaging fallacy that grotesquely flawed Britain is somehow “Great”.

At what? Certainly at exporting inequality. Another of their racist buffoons, unfortunately a clever, efficient specimen, Cecil John Rhodes, was a past master of land expropriation and voter suppression. No amount of his ill-gotten money given to educating the descendants of the millions he subjugated can serve as adequate atonement for his crimes.

It’s difficult to think of something African that Britain has touched that hasn’t turned into pain. In South Africa, as in many other places, when the empire was finally done with us, it up and left and we had to deal with the awfulness over which it had presided. Like the 1913 Land Act, which forced blacks off essentially unowned land they had lived on for hundreds of years and into the gold mines to earn the money they were told they needed to pay to continue living there.

The legislation was passed by South Africa’s white-dominated parliament, but it needed royal assent to become law. That meant King George V had to agree. George was the grandson of Victoria and the father of Edward VIII, who abdicated and left the throne to George VI — Elizabeth II’s father. Leaving aside the illegitimacy of the British queen’s authority, how do we take seriously the idea that she isn’t as irredeemably racist as her forebears? And that her loyal, loving subjects wouldn’t want it any other way?

So forgive us out here in the colonies if we scoff at the disingenuous surprise that there is racism in English cricket. There is racism in every facet of UK society, which wouldn’t have prospered without it. Between them, the Dutch and British colonists brought racism to our region and enforced it as the highest authority — the only authority — of the land. It has infected, as it had to and continues to do, cricket and everything else in this country at every level.

The game in South Africa has made a valiant attempt to confront those wrongs in the form of CSA’s Social Justice and Nation-Building project. Thirty-five days of often harrowing hearings involving accusers and accused alike will inform a report, which will include recommendations, that is to be submitted by the end of the month. That will be the start of fixing the future. But only the start.

Welcome, England, to the real world — which you have shaped in important and terrible ways. You gave us cricket, but at what cost? We’re still counting, and will be for years.

Here’s hoping it was one of your own who, on seeing the profanity on the side of that delivery truck in Bethnal Green, blotted out one word and replaced it: “Fuck da racists.”

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Kolpak Kyle returns as admirable Abbott: ready to give back to SA, but not to play for Proteas

“As much as South Africans want to see Kolpak go, a lot of the English supporters didn’t want to see us there. We almost felt we were outsiders there, and I suppose we were outsiders here in South Africa.” – Kyle Abbott

Telford Vice | Cape Town

“What were you intending? My fishing or the way I look after Christmas? What were you trying to get at there? I’m going with the fishing. Thank you.” Kyle Abbott was joking. Wednesday’s news that he had signed for the Titans for the rest of the 2020/21 season was written up as the franchise having “landed a big fish” — not least because Abbott said he had been “sitting pretty comfortable in Durban [his hometown] doing my fishing” before the deal was sealed. On Thursday, when he gave his first press conference as a Titans player, he had the chance to ask reporters, clearly in fun, questions of his own.

The tenor was starkly different to Abbott’s last presser in South Africa, in January 2017, when he tried to explain why he had chosen to end his international career by signing a four-year Kolpak contract with Hampshire. He was 29. Despite competing for a place in the XI with Dale Steyn, Vernon Philander, Morné Morkel and Kagiso Rabada, he had played in 20 of South Africa’s 36 matches across the formats in the previous year, including half of their 10 Tests. Abbott’s decision sparked anger in South Africa. Unlike others who had exercised this option, he was in the prime in his career and he was being given the opportunities he had earned. What more did the man want? “It’s four years of security and playing cricket is an incredibly insecure environment for anyone,” he said then.

Had being left out of the side, for transformation reasons, for the 2015 World Cup semi-final despite the fact that he was South Africa’s leading bowler in the tournament been a factor? “Ever since I played professional cricket in South Africa there has always been a quota system,” Abbott said. “I have never used it as an excuse and I won’t use it as an excuse now. If you want to buy me some groceries in the next 10 years you are more than welcome to. I need to pay bills. I need to buy groceries. Are you going to buy my groceries?”

It didn’t help that, five days earlier — and five months after he had, unbeknown to his South Africa teammates, signed with Hampshire — Abbott had told another press conference: “The team’s in a great space and so am I. It’s exciting to see what’s going to come. There’s only 90 or so of us who have played Test cricket [for South Africa since readmission] so I count myself incredibly lucky to be able to do it. It’s the place where you want to play your cricket. When Faf [du Plessis] welcomed Theunis de Bruyn into the squad he said, ‘This is where you’re going to be playing your cricket; it doesn’t get any better than this.’ And he’s absolutely right. We’re enjoying our cricket at the moment because we’ve got that attitude of, ‘This is the place, this is where we want to play, this is the place we want to perform and really be tested’.”

Four years on, Abbott has put many more miles on the clock of lived experience. “People don’t realise that it was never an easy decision for any of us, having spoken to a lot of the Kolpaks,” he said on Thursday. “Even life over there is not as easy as people may think, from being away from home for six months to catching quite a lot of flak from people in the crowd. As much as South Africans want to see Kolpak go, a lot of the English supporters didn’t want to see us there. So there’s a lot things we had to navigate. We almost felt we were the outsiders there, and I suppose we were the outsiders here in South Africa.

“But it’s our jobs. I do understand where people are coming from. It’s an emotional thing. It’s a patriotic thing. I get that. It’s stuff that’s on our minds and that we take into consideration. But, for myself definitely, it was purely a career decision. I don’t regret anything.”

Abbott has taken 250 wickets for Hampshire in 90 matches in all formats. In 43 first-class games, he has claimed 183 at 18.78. He was county championship’s third-highest wicket-taker in 2017, joint seventh in 2018, and second in 2019. His haul of 17/86 against Somerset at Southampton in September 2019 were the best figures in global first-class cricket in more than 64 years. Unsurprisingly, Hampshire are keeping Abbott on their books as an overseas professional for at least another two years.

On Thursday he said county cricket had made him a better player than he had been when he abandoned his international career: “I’ve grown a hell of a lot there as a bowler, and probably as a person because I’ve been thrust responsibility. I was the go-to man in most situations and most games. The strength of the overseas players and the other Kolpaks you played against in most teams [made] the brand of cricket incredibly strong.”

In 2004/05, South Africa’s highest level of domestic cricket shrank from 11 to six teams. But CSA’s recent decision to restructure the model means 15 sides split into two divisions — with provision for promotion and relegation — are due to take the field in 2021/22, costing 76 players their contracts. But Abbott approved because the move would reshape the domestic game into something like England’s: “I’ve said for ages that the first-class system in the UK has to among the strongest, if not the strongest, in the world. The amount of teams that are competing every week for something can only strengthen cricket. In division one, the top four or five are competing for the trophy and the bottom guys are competing to avoid relegation. You might only have two or three teams out of it and not playing for much. To have that strength and competitiveness, especially in first-class cricket, is excellent.

“It’s been a long time coming that CSA needed to do something like this and put more value on results. In a normal season here, once you get a couple of rained-out games, especially in first-class cricket, and then maybe a draw, you’re out of [the running] and there’s no way you can get back.

“Now, those remaining games are going to be huge because no-one wants to be relegated. I’ve been on the brink of it in 2017. It went down to the last hour of the last day of 14 first-class games. It’s a horrible feeling knowing that you could go down and play in division two the following year.

“It’s long overdue for South Africa considering the amount of facilities that we have, from Buffalo Park [in East London] to up here in Potch; places that can host good first-class cricket.”

The Kolpak era ended on December 31, when the United Kingdom left the European Union, blocking a drain of talent from South Africa. How did Abbott feel about the hand that has fed him since 2017 being slapped away? “That’s definitely closed a door for a lot of guys, especially guys who have played a Test or so [for South Africa] and then 12 months down the line they don’t see a future anymore. That … can only be good for South African cricket — to keep the players here and to keep the system strong.”

And, he said, he wanted to do his bit in that cause: “Going into next season with more franchises opening, the more experience and the less watered down the system is, the better. We want to see South African cricket in a stronger position. That was one of my reasons for coming back and to play. I feel like I still owe a lot to South African cricket. Even if it is just here with the Titans.

“I’ve already got stuck in. Thando Ntini and I have had some great chats at practice in the last couple of days. I’m pretty happy and I’m excited to impart some of that knowledge back into the system and hopefully see South African cricket stay strong.”

Did he harbour ambitions to use his acquired expertise to return to South Africa’s dressingroom? “It’s not in my immediate view. I’ve had a very tough 2020 not playing cricket [because of Covid-19 international travel restrictions]. So I just need to get back to the where I was 15 or 18 months ago. My objective is to get to playing professionally and back to the level I was at, which is proving to be quite difficult at the moment, I must admit. Although the body’s had enough rest, it’s been difficult getting a competitive edge back.”

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t interested in his former teammates, and he thinks they’re on the up after an indifferent period: “South Africa and the Proteas are always close to me heart and I’ve always got an eye on what’s happening here. As onlookers we don’t know what’s going on inside the environment. But I’ve chatted to guys in the last couple of days, and asking how the national team’s going, and it seems like everyone in that environment is incredibly happy. They seem to think it’s in a very healthy position, which is great news.”

Abbott’s competitive cricket last year amounted to five overs bowled in two matches for the Jaffna Stallions of the Lanka Premier League in November and December. Lockdown at home in South Africa, he said, had taken its toll mentally and physically: “For the first couple of months I was quite happy. In my career spanning 12 years it was the first forced long break. I was enjoying the time off and not feeling guilty that I wasn’t playing anywhere or I wasn’t training or bowling.

“But when they started kicking off in the UK I started to itch. I missed it, more so from a changeroom perspective. My mates there in Hampshire, I missed spending times with them after games. These are the guys you live with, day in and day out.

“I found myself at stages incredibly unmotivated. I would sit for two or three days and think, ‘Why must I gym? Why must I run? There’s nothing coming up. I can’t see an end.’ I think a lot of professional sportsmen went through that at the time. To break away from that and from my home and come up here to the Titans was the change that I needed to try and get back to where I was nearly 18 months ago.”

Abbott’s downtime ends on Saturday, when he turns out for the Titans against the Dolphins — his former franchise — in a one-day game in Potchefstroom. If he does well enough to be summoned to a press conference, he can expect a full house of reporters. Not many players are as worth listening to, because so few say what they think so directly. Respect, Mr Abbott. And welcome back.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Kolpak window closing, but South Africa’s are boarded up

“To make a living in the game, top cricketers don’t need South African cricket. That is worrying.” – Andrew Breetzke, SACA chief executive

TELFORD VICE | Cape Town

NOT long ago the impending end of the Kolpak era would have been celebrated in South Africa. After 16 years in which 64 of the country’s players had chosen to further their careers in England, the balance would be restored. Too much of a generation of talent had been lost, but the drain would be blocked. Cricket’s coming home, South Africans would say. If only it was that simple.

The Cotonou agreement, which allows players who are citizens of 79 countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific to work as locals in the European Union, expires in December. But the EU’s website says the organisation “will work towards a substantially revised agreement with a common foundation at ACP [Africa, Caribbean and Pacific] level combined with three regional tailored partnerships for Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific”. So South Africans who have taken up Kolpak contracts — which make them unavailable for national selection in return for not being regarded as overseas professionals with their counties — might have had a reasonable expectation of the arrangement continuing in some form.

But the United Kingdom (UK) is set to leave the EU at the end of this year, a truth the Brexit-supporting UK government seems determined to realise come what may. In less politically polarised times an economy hit hard by Covid-19 surely would have prompted negotiations for a delayed departure. One look at prime minister Boris Johnson’s hair should tell you sensibility isn’t high among his priorities. Kolpak’s days, then, are numbered: the only remaining domestic cricket in England this year is the knockout section of the T20 Blast, which will end at Edgbaston on October 3.

Of course, there will still be room for overseas professionals. But county cricket is suffering, along with almost every other industry, and will have less money to spend on such luxuries. That door is closing for players currently on Kolpak deals. Add to the equation the parlous state of the game in South Africa, which can only make prospective professionals doubt that cricket is stable enough in the country to be worth pursuing as a career, and it isn’t difficult to understand why the end of Kolpak is far from a reason to be unconditionally cheerful.

“We already have current players asking, ‘Must I work on my plan B?’,” Andrew Breetzke, the chief executive of the South African Cricketers’ Association, said. “The fact that the South Africans in the IPL are pulling their weight in their teams is evidence that, to make a living in the game, top cricketers don’t need South African cricket at that level. That is worrying, especially when you look at the turmoil in the South African cricket landscape. Of course, the players have got to get to [IPL] level, and for that they do need South African cricket.”

The market is also being squeezed from outside the country, and more so than in other sports. “If you’re a Stormers [franchise rugby union] player and you’re not quite making it for the Springboks you can still get a gig somewhere overseas,” Breetzke said. “There’s a career outside of South Africa even for non-Springboks, but there isn’t necessarily a career outside of South Africa for the non-Protea. Every guy who makes it overseas has actually made it as a Protea. That makes a cricket career much more difficult.”

Considering all that, should South Africans be pleased that Kolpak is due to disappear from the cricket vocabulary next year? “From a SACA perspective, we always want to have as many playing opportunities and earning possibilities for our members,” Breetzke said. “Kolpak was one such opportunity. If you look at someone like Dane Vilas, it’s done wonders for his ability to keep playing as a professional. From that perspective, it is sad.”

Wicketkeeper-batter Vilas played a T20I and six Tests from March 2012 to January 2016. Although a quality gloveman and more than decent with the bat — he has scored 21 first-class centuries — Vilas had AB de Villiers breathing over one shoulder and Quinton de Kock over the other. In an age of superstar batters being turned into wicketkeepers, Vilas was always going to come third in that company. But since 2017 he has been able to juggle playing for the Dolphins with turning out for Lancashire on a Kolpak contract.

Now what? Vilas has petitioned the ECB to stay on as an overseas player for the 2021 season on the strength of the fact that his wife holds a UK ancestral visa. But a letter from Alan Fordham, the ECB’s head of operations for first-class cricket, suggests that isn’t a strong enough argument.

The letter, which Cricbuzz has seen, is dated September 24 and is addressed shotgun style in an indication of how enmeshed Kolpak players are in the English system: “To first-class county cricket clubs, WEDS [Women’s Elite Domestic Structure] regional hosts, men’s Hundred teams, women’s Hundred teams, PCA [the Professional Cricketers’ Association], ICC Europe, Cricket South Africa, Zimbabwe Cricket, Cricket West Indies, Cricket Ireland”.

It confirms what has long been on the cards: “All Kolpak players currently registered as a regulation 2 [non-UK national] player will have their registration cancelled by the ECB with effect from 1 January 2021.” And that: “No further applications by any Kolpak player for registration as a regulation 2 player will be accepted (unless such a player meets the eligibility criteria detailed in the amended Regulation 2). And, with apparent reference to players like Vilas: “The above will apply regardless of whether such player currently holds, or is able to obtain, an ancestral or family visa giving them the right to work in the UK.”

Fordham makes the point that, “Should the 31 December 2020 end date of the [Brexit] transition period change, the above changes will be subject to further review by the ECB.” But that seems unlikely.

Having taken off his trade unionist’s hard hat, Breetzke could see the other side of the argument: “From a South African perspective, [the end of Kolpak] brings certainty to an area that has been controversial on various levels — financially and politically. As it stands we don’t have one Kolpak player who is contracted within South Africa; such has been the move towards not contracting Kolpak players.

“Now we’ll have a number of players who become available to be contracted domestically who previously, from a practical point of view, weren’t able to be. Legally they could have been, but that would have needed money from outside the franchise [salary] allocation and they never had it. Now you can contract Simon Harmer as a Warriors players from the allocation because he’s going to be an overseas professional [in England] and be a local in South Africa again.

“It opens up the game for South Africans coming back. It’s actually a positive for the strength of South African cricket. It takes away the issue of whether we should be supporting players who can’t play for South Africa, which was a very strong narrative.”

That’s not to say the future will be straightforward. “We will have normal domestic players who only have a domestic contract,” Breetzke said. “We’ll also have domestic players who are local but are foreign overseas players in England. And we’re going to have non-contracted South African players in the international market — AB de Villiers, Chris Morris; those guys. That does complicate how you’re going to select for the Proteas. Must the player have played in that domestic competition to be considered for the Proteas in that specific format?”

South Africans have cursed Kolpak since 2004, when Claude Henderson became the first player to agree to its restrictive terms. Now, as the end of the age looms, they might find they have new reasons to keep swearing.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Paterson could become the last of the Kolpaks

“As a 30-plus year-old bowler you don’t have that many years left in you.” – Ashwell Prince sends Dane Paterson, freshly 31, on his way with a backhanded hug.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

DANE Paterson could become the latest and perhaps the last South African to take the Kolpak route out of the country’s cricket structures. Fast bowler Paterson, who has played a dozen white-ball internationals since January 2017 and featured in two Tests against England last season, is believed to be in discussions with Nottinghamshire.

“We’ve been informed he’s doing so,” Paterson’s Cobras coach, Ashwell Prince, told an online press conference on Monday, without naming the county concerned, when asked whether Paterson had agreed a Kolpak contract. “But he needs final boxes to be ticked by the ECB [England Cricket Board]. We’ve been told it’s going to be done.”

If the deal is sealed Paterson will become the 69th player to exercise the Kolpak option. Only 20 have not been South African. But the arrangement could be shortlived. The United Kingdom (UK) left the European Union (EU) on March 31, which spells the imminent end of the Kolpak ruling’s impact on cricket. Currently, the measure enables counties to thwart the England Cricket Board’s (ECB) rules on how many foreigners they are allowed to field. Kolpak privileges are extended to the citizens of the 78 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries whose governments are party to the Cotonou agreement with the EU. Essentially, Kolpak makes the citizens of 105 other countries — the remaining 27 in the EU and the 78 Cotonou signatories — English in terms of their eligibility to play county cricket. That will change on December 31 this year, which marks the end of the UK’s transition period out of the EU. So, unless the transition is prolonged, the Kolpak window will close at the end of the year.

But Paterson would seem to have a plan B up his sleeve. “He has signed a Kolpak deal effectively,” Cobras spokesperson David Brooke said. “He is just awaiting the final rubber stamp from the ECB. If Kolpak falls away then he will be playing as an overseas pro for the county. We have been requested not to mention the name of the County until Dane has had his final interview with the ECB to ratify it.”

The news has probably come as a surprise to Cricket South Africa, who it appears were under the impression Paterson had turned Notts down. But there is unlikely to be major disappointment about a player who turned 31 on Saturday leaving a country not short of fast bowlers. “As a 30-plus year-old bowler you don’t have that many years left in you,” Prince said. “I’m sure they sit down and calculate what realistic opportunities will they have of playing for the Proteas. If not, they’ll consider other options.”

Of course, all avenues for making a living by playing cricket — along with vast swathes of the global economy — have been thrown into doubt by the coronavirus pandemic. On Monday, Yorkshire revealed they had become the first county to furlough their players and staff. Salaries are covered for now, largely by the UK government’s job retention scheme, but the situation remains fraught with uncertainty. The most high profile Kolpak defector in recent years, Duanne Olivier, played his first match for Yorkshire in March last year.

First published by Cricbuzz.

A tiny part of the UK electorate has chosen a career liar to oversee a catastrophe

**Downing Street the day Boris Johnson moved in.** Photo: Telford Vice

“Boris! Boris! Boris! Liar! Liar! Liar! Out! Out! Out!” – there’s no fooling some of the people, but enough have been duped to put another wholly unfit person in power.

TELFORD VICE in London

IT’S a long way from Vincent van Gogh to Boris Johnson. Actually, it isn’t. Particularly by bicycle.

Less than two kilometres separates the Tate Britain, the London gallery where some of Van Gogh’s most arresting works have hung this English summer, from Johnson’s new address: 10 Downing Street.

On July 24, with the sun slung low in the sky on the then hottest day of the year, a hazy, muggy 29 degrees, and a mind still starry with sizzling sunflowers and searing self-portraits, it wasn’t difficult to misread the directions on the gizmo.

A turn missed here, another mistakenly taken there, and suddenly the sturdily kerbed blue lanes of the “Cycle Super Highway” along the Thames — thanks to whoever had them built and explained to then Lord Mayor Boris what they were and why they were a good thing — disappeared like good manners in the Commons.

The media tent town that has been pitched on College Green, hard by Parliament, since Brexit was recognised as the bad idea it undoubtedly is loomed into view. And there it was: the seething maw of Downing Street itself.

“Boris! Boris! Boris! Liar! Liar! Out! Out! Out!” You could almost hear the splatter of spittle into the loudhailer’s microphone. Rage rose from the thousands of protestors like the heat shimmering off the pavement.

The scene was straight out of South Africa in the months before Nelson Mandela was released, when swells of sentiment and hope overpowered the dictates of the dying apartheid state and we took to the streets en masse. Except that we were happy. These people were not.

Not a peep of support for Johnson or Brexit was heard. It was a warm welcome — the wrong kind of warm — for the United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister, who had moved in only hours before.

The sun’s rays glared down, reminiscent of the single light bulb that hovers starkly over Pablo Picasso’s Guernica to illuminate the horror beneath.

How would Van Gogh have rendered the tableau at Downing Street on July 24, 2019? A Dutchman who lived in London, southern Belgium, Paris and other parts of France, he was an empathetic citizen of the world who ventured down coal mines to try and understand the plight of the working class. He put great value in capturing on canvas the everyday dignity of ordinary people toiling hard for their living. He was lustily in love with the world, imperfections and all.

Van Gogh would have sneered at Johnson, an oaf obnoxious beyond even his racism, and a product of inbred selfishness who has done his class proud by becoming, undeservedly, a rich, powerful, 55-year-old juvenile delinquent.

That’s probably why he has been made leader, by a pitifully tiny but outrageously important minority, of a country built on the proceeds of slavery and colonialism.

Johnson’s illegitimate elevation is an indictment of capitalism and what the west likes to call democracy, and a cautionary tale that carries a sting: Donald Trump isn’t the only dangerous buffoon who has escaped the zoo.

But, beyond his bluster, what does Johnson’s ill-gotten gain of the Premiership mean for the United Kingdom’s erstwhile colonies?

That depends on whether he delivers Brexit. If he lies his way out of doing so — plausible considering he built a career in untruth when he impersonated a journalist — not a lot will change about the relationship between the ex-masters and servants.

But if he does drag his country out of the European Union (EU) the formerly colonised will have reasons to be cheerful: the UK will need their labour and skills.

Some of us, that is. Already more welcoming noises are being made towards Asians of all stripes, particularly those clever, industrious Indians and Chinese. Africans? Not so much. Black people, you are still on your own.

Johnson has a long rap sheet for expressing racism against Africans. He had this to say about then Prime Minister’s Tony Blair’s imminent visit to Congo in the Daily Telegraph in January 2002: “No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird. Like Zeus, back there in the Iliad, he has turned his shining eyes away, far over the lands of the Hippemolgoi, the drinkers of mares’ milk. He has forgotten domestic affairs, and here, as it happens, in this modest little country that elected him, hell has broken loose.”

Here Johnson is in the Spectator in February that year, writing from Uganda: “The continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more … The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty.”

You couldn’t make this stuff up. But Johnson has. In 1987 he was sacked from his first job, at the Times, for, he said years afterwards, “mildly sandpapering something somebody said”.

In fact, he had invented a quote attributed to historian Colin Lucas, his godfather. Johnson wrote that Edward II and his alleged lover, Piers Gaveston, liaised at the Rose Palace. But Gaveston was beheaded in 1312 and the palace wasn’t built until 13 years later.

“It was extremely difficult, and I had absolutely no idea what to do,” Johnson said in a subsequent interview in the Independent. “I was 23, overcome with guilt and shame that this error — this howler of mine attributed to Colin — had crept onto the front page of the Times, which was holy territory for me. So I made matters worse. I wrote a further story saying that the mystery had deepened about the date of the castle.”

Johnson had resorted to Lucas because “I was desperate to get hold of a historian who could help me, but the only one I knew was my godfather”.

He couldn’t ask an editor for a contact for a historian? He couldn’t look one up? He couldn’t get hold of a master at his old school, Eton, of course, or a professor at his university, Oxford, of course?

Johnson was hired by the Times only because of his family connections. It’s rough justice that he was also fired because of them.

The episode set the tone for a life not only lived in lies and bombastic caricature, but with a perverse pride in being a loudly empty, deceitful vessel.

Johnson wouldn’t know integrity if it smacked him upside the head with a dead fish. There was no surprise in July, when his claim at Conservative Party leadership hustings that EU regulations forced British herring merchants to package their products using plastic “ice pillows” — which he slammed as “pointless, expensive, environmentally damaging” while waving a herring above his head — was debunked. Turns out the relevant regulations are British, not European. Another speech, another lie. Worse, he was elected leader anyway.

There’s no knowing what he really thinks because he really doesn’t think. And so there’s no more taking him seriously now than when, in the words of James Wood, a contemporary at Eton and now a New Yorker staff writer, he “charged around the college lanes”.

“The bigfoot stoop (he was known as ‘the Yeti’), the bumbling confidence, the skimmed-milk pallor, the berserk hair, the alarming air of imminent self-harm, which gave the impression that he had been freshly released from some protective institution: all was already in place,” Wood wrote in the London Review of Books.

But there’s devious cleverness below that uncombed, cocaine-white thatch, which Johnson reportedly flicks into its familiar chaotic state moments before the cameras roll. It showed itself in June when he told a Talk Radio host he relaxed by fashioning packing cases into models of buses. Until then, googling “boris bus” produced evidence of the Leave campaign’s slogan — “We send the EU £350-million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead” — which had been plastered onto the side of a London bus as a marketing ploy. The claim was proven to be false, but Johnson kept repeating it regardless. Google “boris bus” now and the truth is diluted by descriptions of his esoteric alleged hobby.

The mercury rose further still in England on July 25, the first full day of Johnson’s tenure, almost touching 39 degrees — a record. It felt, ominously, like hell.

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Leading Edge: Cheer up, SA cricket. You aren’t Zimbabwe. Yet …

The end of the Kolpak era could prompt South Africa’s players to give up on cricket as a career altogether.

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in South Africa

IT’S tough being a cricketminded South African. But cheer up: you could have been Zimbabwean, Zambian or Croatian.

The administrative bodies from those countries have been suspended by the International Cricket Council (ICC), so Zimbabwe, Zambia and Croatia cannot play in tournaments. It gets worse for Morocco, who have been expelled from the ICC.

That the game is in trouble in South Africa is beyond doubt. On the field and off, the challenges mount by the week.

Some of this is beyond cricket’s control. The game is a victim of a faltering society that is at the mercy of a shaky economy.

Cricket cannot be immune from the effects of those factors. It doesn’t help that enough players are able to export their skills to accelerate the hollowing out of the game in our country.

That could change, what with English counties having been warned by the England Cricket Board that their Kolpak players would be ineligible if the United Kingdom (UK) leaves the European Union (EU) without negotiating a deal.

No deal has yet been agreed. So as things stand the UK — now under the control of reckless idiot Boris Johnson, the new Trumpian Prime Minister — will crash out of the EU on October 31.

So all current Kolpak players, and all wannabe Kolpak players, could be out of a job after the 2020 English season.

Which sounds like a reason to be cheerful: players will no longer be syphoned off by the county system’s better salaries and England’s better working and living conditions.

Except that the end of the Kolpak era could also prompt South Africa’s players to give up on cricket as a career altogether.

With the Indian Premier League having apparently fallen out of love with our players and no more chance to catch a county’s Kolpak eye, better to find a proper job rather than put up with the ailing franchise system.

Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) plan to scrap that arrangement in favour of doubling the number of domestic sides may or may not have been shelved — it depends who you ask, and which day you ask them — but doubtless it would only hasten the disappearance of skills and experience from the talent pool in favour of more grown-up ways to earn a crust.

So cricket’s biggest challenge in South Africa isn’t Kolpak, whether or not it survives the joke who is Johnson and his merry pranksters. Instead, it’s avoiding the Zimbabwefication of the game.

Cricket north of the Limpopo is rarely not in crisis. It’s landed itself in the dwang this time because the government of mini-Mugabe Emmerson Mnangagwa, in the shape of the Sports and Recreation Commission (SRC), a state agency, forbade Zimbabwe Cricket (ZC) from electing their own board.

The election went ahead anyway, and the new board and their acting chief executive were promptly prevented from assuming their posts by the SRC. ZC complained to the ICC about government interference. The ICC concurred, and so ZC were suspended.

Think that kind of thing can’t happen in South Africa? Think again. As we speak, what a source called “messy, sly” efforts are afoot to keep the president of one of CSA’s most influential unions in office because he is aligned to powerful figures at the level above.

Hark: where there are suits there is also a bad smell.

Kolpak as unpopular with ECB as in SA

Fewer English players in county cricket mean weaker England teams.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

KOLPAK isn’t a swearword only in South Africa. It’s as unloved in English cricket except by the counties, who keep the stream of Saffers and other pseudo-Europeans flowing onto the circuit.

The issue rose like a stink again last week when Duanne Olivier became the 43rd South African to take up the option, signing a contract with Yorkshire that will stop him from playing for South Africa for at least the next three years.

Kolpak deals used to be sought mostly by cricketers nearing the end of their careers, but Olivier, 26, has become part of a worrying trend of younger players choosing that route.

Like Kyle Abbott and Rilee Rossouw, who went Kolpak in 2017, Olivier has interrupted his career for South Africa despite being a regular member of the team.

They have been lured by the security offered in a system that could pay them more than they would earn even as leading players in South Africa and without the pressures that come with having to perform at international level.

More are likely to follow for as long as the United Kingdom (UK) remains part of the EU, which is uncertain.

In 2016 the UK voted to leave the bloc and it is due to do so on March 29 this year. But whether that will happen is far from decided — a postponement or a second referendum have been mooted even as the EU continue to say the UK are out at the end of the month.

Other countries see Brexit, as the UK’s separation from the EU has been dubbed, as a looming catastrophe.

But, for the England Cricket Board (ECB), it could be the most effective way out of a problem that has only grown since Claude Henderson became the first Kolpak player in 2004: at too many county matches you can’t see the wood of the English players for the trees of those from everywhere else.

Andrew Hall, who went Kolpak for Northamptonshire in 2008 and now heads sport at Milton Keynes Preparatory School 90 kilometres north-west of London, remembers being part of a game against Leicestershire that year in which 13 of the 22 players were not eligible for England.

They included HD Ackerman, Boeta Dippenaar, Henderson, Nicky Bojé, Lance Klusener and Johan van der Wath, along with Jamaica’s Jermaine Lawson, Ireland’s Niall O’Brien and Kepler Wessels’ Australian-born son, Riki Wessels.

There have been other twists to this tale. Johannesburg-born and raised Grant Elliott had played his last game for New Zealand when he used his South African passport to turn Kolpak for Warwickshire in 2017.

Andre Mehrtens was born in Durban to New Zealand parents who moved back home after four years. That was enough to prompt the former All Black flyhalf to obtain a South African passport so he could join Harlequins, who employed him as a Kolpak for the 2005-06 season.

The counties are willing and able to pay foreigners handsomely for their services, but the ECB are less than happy about trying to field competitive international teams from a smaller pool of homegrown players.

“They’ve been trying to stem Kolpak signings for years; since I was playing for Northants,” Hall said. “So it may end abruptly. But while the uncertainty of your future is still so big for a lot of younger players coming onto the scene in South Africa, the Kolpak option is there.”

Money talks, and pounds talk louder than rands. And there’s little the ECB can do about the fact that the law is the law.

So four years ago they imposed what amounted to a tax. Counties would be paid £1 100 — R20 600 in today’s money — less per match for Kolpak every player they picked. And a change in the work permit regulations meant that before players could sign on the Kolpak line they had to have earned at least one Test cap in the preceding 12 months, or five in five years, or appeared in 15 white-ball internationals in the previous two years.

Did it work? No: Olivier was the 21st player to Kolpak since the new rules were adopted. Yes, it’s become popular enough to be used as a verb.

But for Francois Brink, a player agent with One World of Sport, the storm may be passing.

“I think Kolpak might’ve reached a saturation point,” Brink said in the wake of Yorkshire’s news on Olivier.

“[There are] Not many players left who qualify, [and] not many counties left that can afford it.

“I’ve yet to meet a South African player whose primary ambition isn’t to play for the Proteas. Kolpak is a very personal decision depending on where the player believes he is in his career.”

From his lips, cricketminded types in South Africa and England will hope, to the game’s gods’ ears.