“What if the game falls over, it just can’t go on?” - Jacques Faul
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
TO all the uncertainties facing cricket and everything else, add these: your premier team is without a title sponsor, you do not have a Test captain, the chief executive and the director of cricket are temporary appointees, and you are about to advertise for a convenor of national selectors, a new women’s coach and management component, and a new under-19 men’s coach and management component. Welcome to the realities of cricket in South Africa.
The existential threat posed by the global coronavirus outbreak has the potential to obliterate civilisation as we know it. Cricket is an infinitesimally small part of that equation, and South African cricket a still smaller part. But the game here seems to be doing its best to ensure that, as Cricket South Africa (CSA) acting chief executive Jacques Faul said during an online press conference on Tuesday with an eye on the bigger picture, “The world will never be the same.”
Whether that world will include what we could call big cricket is not at all certain. Perhaps permanently, perhaps for several seasons hence, the game could be confined to backyards and parks while the grand stadiums and gracious grounds of the present are put to more important use as testing centres and field hospitals. For the first time since cricket in South Africa was officially racially unified in 1991, how many black and how many white players are in a team is irrelevant — if the team doesn’t exist, how can that matter?
“You’ve got to see what’s immediately in front of you, and then you’ve got to have a helicopter view,” Faul said. “What happens if [cricket is] not there for three months, six months, nine months …? We’ve only got to nine months, but you’ve got to take a long-term view of the scenario. You’ve got to assess the resources available now and how far they can stretch.
“We’ll probably do scenario planning on three levels. One is the worst case — you run out of capacity to run cricket and it becomes a recreational sport. The second is the most likely; probably a point between the best-case scenario and the worst. What if the game falls over, it just can’t go on? In assessing that, our biggest source of income is broadcasting. And if it’s going to fall over it’s going to come from there. That will be significantly important when you plan strategically. We list our biggest sources of income and then look at how their own environments have changed. There’s good and bad in it. [Broadcasters] would still like to stimulate high-level competition because that makes for a good product. We hope that will help us. But this has got us all nervous and all planning.”
Without cricket to put on their screens, some of the world’s biggest sport broadcasters would struggle to survive. And without broadcasters, international and much of professional cricket would struggle to survive. Who needs who more? Whatever else this is, or isn’t, undoubtedly it’s a moment of truth for the game.
“It’s funny how the world prioritises itself,” Faul said. “Health is the most important thing; the well-being of your loved ones. I really feel for poor people out there. Sport is the most important thing in our lives and it does feed a lot of mouths, but we’ve got to be honest — the world has got bigger challenges than our industry and our challenges.”
What South Africans can bank on, to some degree, is another instalment of the exciting but expensive Mzansi Super League. “We’re still in the final negotiations, but I can confirm that there will be MSL 2020,” Faul said. “We cannot give too many details other than stating that a third edition of the MSL will take place.”
But the unknown looms larger than everything and anything else. Players’ salaries, for instance, will probably become part of the lottery of cricket’s future. “At this stage we will have enough capacity to see us through the next season,” Faul said. “Where players would lose out is on match fees and winning bonuses. But we’ll have to look at the financial impact post this season — how much money will be available to contract players. We’ve got to crunch the numbers first and experience the total effect of Covid-19. For now, I don’t see anybody getting less money than they’ve been contracted for. In future, there is a likelihood that the players’ allocation would be less.”
Faul is in his position, at least for now, because the previous permanent incumbent, Thabang Moroe, made such a mess of things that even CSA’s shambolic board couldn’t continue to look the other way — not before time, they suspended him in December. Part of the fallout is that Standard Bank, a sponsor for the past 21 years, will walk away at the end of April. In December, Graeme Smith was named acting director of cricket for three months. The reason given for the time limit was that Smith had a prior commitment to commentate on the IPL. Now that the tournament is in doubt his immediate future is also unclear, although he seems set to stay on with CSA.
Faf du Plessis relinquished the captaincy in February, and while Quinton de Kock has succeeded him in the white-ball formats there is no word on who might be in charge for the Test series in the Caribbean in July and August. That’s if the rubber goes ahead.
Part of the madness in Moroe’s method was to abolish the selection panel. After Moroe himself was jettisoned, Linda Zondi, the convenor of the disbanded selection committee, was brought back as an independent selector. Zondi had a successful tenure as convenor when that was a part-time post, and CSA could do worse than appoint him now that the job is to be made fulltime. Similarly, Hilton Moreeng, who has coached the women’s team to the semi-finals of the 2017 World Cup and the 2020 T20 World Cup, has done enough to keep his job. Not so Lawrence Mahatlane, whose under-19 men’s team have lost seven of the 10 one-day games they have played this year, which followed nine consecutive defeats in 2019.
Of all of those in limbo, Smith seems closest to surety. “We’re in final negotiations with Graeme and hope to make an announcement next week,” Faul said, prompting Smith to quip: “Otherwise today is my last day at work.” The jocularity swung back to Faul: “One of the things we’re talking around is that Graeme should shave that beard off before we employ him.” At that, Smith’s smile spread wide the fluff he currently sports on his chin.
The lightness of mood couldn’t last, of course. How did Smith assess his initial tenure, considering the national men’s team have won only seven of their 15 completed games since he came aboard? “Some aspects have been good, in some aspects there’s been a lot of learning. That’s been the most important thing in the past few months — to understand what’s in place, why is it in place, what has been the strategy around some of the decisions that have been made in the past. And then to assess all of that and try to formulate a way forward. There’s been a huge amount going on from a commercial perspective, to contracting, getting our teams performing well across the board, high performance … I feel I’m probably in a good place to look to implement some stuff, maybe debate some strategies going forward. If everything works out in the way we hope it does, I hope — in this uncertain time — that we will be able to put out a team at the [men’s] T20 World Cup [scheduled for Australia in October and November] that will be really successful, and by next summer to have an idea of who our 40, 45 players on the men’s side are to take the Proteas into the future.”
South Africa’s next engagement, if it goes ahead, is six white-ball games in Sri Lanka in June. Currently the players are training individually in a country on lockdown, where gyms have been shut and exercising outdoors is prohibited. But push will come to shove. “We need plus-minus six weeks to have our players fully ready for tours,” Smith said. “Financially, with stuff like holding flights, around that six-week mark is when decisions need to be made.”
The start of June is not quite nine weeks away. So much could change by then. Whether it gets better or worse is, like everything else, uncertain.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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