Cricket needs rugby’s radicalism

“Cricket were ahead of rugby. Have cricket taken their eye off the ball? I don’t know.” – teacher and rugby zealot Brendan Fogarty.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

MAYBE Kagiso Rabada should have heeded the signs and not veered off his original path.

Rabada was born on May 25, 1995 — the same day Francois Pienaar’s team started their journey to World Cup glory by beating the Wallabies at Newlands. He arrived at St Stithians as a hotshot fullback.

Had he not kicked rugby into touch for a future in fast bowling, might he have been welcomed back to Cape Town on Monday among Siya Kolisi’s heroes to help thousands of their compatriots celebrate the Springboks winning the William Webb Ellis Cup for the third time?

Rabada has been the top ranked bowler in the world in two of the three formats, and is currently in the top five in both. He is also one of the 66 unfortunates who have tried and failed to claim a single men’s cricket World Cup for South Africa.

Clearly, rugby is getting a lot right. Just as clearly, cricket is doing something wrong. But what?

“There’s too much emphasis on racialism, on certain groups needing to be there,” Cassiem Jabbar said as the crowd awaiting the Boks grew outside Cape Town’s city hall.

“I believe that this Springbok team was there on merit. I don’t think there’s any other wings that we could have chosen for South Africa, or any other front row forwards.

“We are past the stage were we talk about quota players and players of colour.

“Some people are still stuck in that conversation.”

Cricket people included, and specifically the prevailing philosophy that some black people are blacker than others and thus more deserving of opportunities.

It was a radical statement coming from someone who might have been recognised as the best scrumhalf in the world had he not been guilty of playing rugby while black during apartheid.

Surely there is more to South Africa’s perennial failure to launch at cricket World Cup’s than an obsession — mostly healthy and necessary, sometimes damaging and dangerous — with colour coding?

“It’s not about plucking talent and putting it into [elite] schools,” Brendan Fogarty said. “We need to invest in communities to ensure that that talent grows in those communities.

“Cricket were ahead of rugby, when you look at programmes like Baker’s Mini-Cricket. Have cricket taken their eye off the ball? I don’t know. But you need a thousand children playing rugby to create one international.

“So if you’re taking a talented player out of a community, that community might not play anymore. We need to have communities, in their thousands, playing cricket. It’s a numbers game.”

That, too, is radical. Fogarty is an isiXhosa teacher at Bishops Preparatory School — about as elite as schools get. But he also runs the Vusa rugby development programme, which counts Springbok and Stormers flank Sikhumbuzo Notshe as an alumnus.

A much highlighted feature of the Boks’ success is that their players come from more than the familiar crop of schools.

Cricket has and is making sincere attempts to spread the gospel. But, of the 16 SA-born Proteas in the 2019 World Cup, only Beuran Hendricks did not attend a high school that has an illustrious sporting history. And Good Hope Seminary School in Gardens is hardly an impoverished township alma mater.

Maybe what cricket needs is what rugby has embraced: radicalism.

First published by the Sunday Times.

Where the World Cup matters most: on the street

Siya Kolisi lifted the trophy for the umpteenth time, but the fire in his eyes was fresh and the rawness in his roar was real.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

NOT for the first time since November 2, Faf de Klerk flashed his famous underwear at the crowd. Not for the last time, surely, thousands gave raucous approval.

They were gathered on Cape Town’s Grand Parade on Monday, and of a mood to share the Springboks’ joy at winning the men’s World Cup.

De Klerk duly took his place on the stage next to Herschel Jantjies, who offered him a fresh king protea.

A flower? For a regte egte oke from Nelspruit? A Waterkloof alumnus? The skater punk scrumhalf who many feel should have his bloody box kicks, well, boxed and shipped somewhere the sun don’t shine?    

“Nah,” De Klerk seemed to say Jantjies with a mildly disdainful shake of his head.

So Jantjies nipped round De Klerk’s back and quietly tucked the stem of the bloom into the waistband of the blond bliksem’s shorts.

All was revealed when De Klerk turned around, and hoards laughed — not at De Klerk but with him. So did he when he got the joke.

Nothing can go wrong when you’ve won the World Cup.

Even if it did on the last leg of the Boks’ nationwide victory celebration: one of their buses broke down on the N2 after they left the city centre for Langa. Briefly, that is — soon the tour of triumph resumed.

As the convoy oozed away from the City Hall it comprised — besides the must-have swarm of motorcycle outriders — the players’ and their families’ bus, another carrying South African Rugby Union staff, a media bus, three large luxury coaches, two of them emblazoned with the Boks’ “Stronger Together” slogan, five unmarked 4x4s, nine South African police vehicles, a three-car blue-light brigade, seven metro cops cars, and two ambulances.

And yet Damian de Allende was comfortable enough amid the clamour to go barefoot.

Cheslin Kolbe was the prow of the good ship Springbok as it inched away, the William Webb Ellis Cup gleaming goldly from his outstretched arms as the human ocean was parted by barricades just enough to allow the bus passage.

How many were there? Many more than enough to bring emotion shuddering back into the veins of hairy, hardened hacks who thought they had long been irreparably calcified with cynicism.

“Waar’s daai blerrie All Blacks nou,” one man in the mosh pit moving slowly next to the players’ bus asked his fellow celebrant, a reference to some Capetonians’ preference for supporting New Zealand over South Africa as a protest against racism that harks back to apartheid.

You could have had any colour jersey you wanted. As long as it was green and gold.

One man wearing exactly that smuggled himself onto the wrong side of the barricade. He was clearly on a mission, and soon it was revealed.

“Stop corruption,” read the hand-written cardboard sign he held up for a few seconds — before security staff swooped to shoo him back where he belonged.

Two women somewhere in their 50s brought up the rear, waving flags that didn’t exist and dancing to tunes that had yet to be heard when the only people who were allowed to play for the Boks were the same colour they were: white.

People clogged much of every street long before the Boks rolled slowly past them, and when their champions finally arrived they thundered their adulation.

Siya Kolisi, the champion of these champions, has taken his place at the front of the bus to hoist the trophy umpteen times these past few days, but when he did it again coming down Loop Street the fire in his eyes was fresh and the rawness in his roar was real.

The wave rolled over, past and through the usual suspects of life on Cape Town’s streets: the homeless, the addicted, the merely poor. They looked on, still homeless, still addicted, still poor. A World Cup win will not save these souls from the thrust of society’s cold shoulder. 

After the fantastical phalanx had made its way a block or two the road behind it cleared enough to reveal, trying to nose along in the wake of all that, a chicken wholesaler’s truck.

The frown on the driver’s face eased when he saw some tarmac where, moments before, the parade had prevailed.

But only until he looked further ahead to see, barrelling brassily, boisterously, bolshily,  beautifully, even, straight down Darling Street and directly at him and his truck, the West London All Stars minstrel group in full and fabulous flow.

The truck stopped. The driver rested an elbow on the sill of his open window, put a hand under his chin, and waited.

’Cause this is Africa.

First published by Times SELECT.