Cricket or no cricket, we still know what the suits did last summer

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TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

Even as the county season goes gently into that good afternoon and the Indian Premier League rages hard across the night sky, in South Africa cricket is nothing more than a warming thought against the bleak reality of looming winter.

It would be spurious to suggest the season is over. To say cricket still respects a season is tantamount to accusing AB de Villiers of stodginess. But, in the coming months, the ground in Johannesburg will freeze and the grass orphaned on it will turn a deathly shade of jaundice. In Cape Town, weeks of rain will drown any talk of cricket. In Durban, where winter visits for a day once every 10 years, cricket would be possible. But pitches prepared outside of the growing season there receive a bowled ball like a soufflé might a fork.

Yes, we have no cricket. No, that is not a bad thing. In this age of corporatised sport, we should welcome a respite from the mindlessness that the suits are evilly adept at pouring into our heads. When the squawk of marketing stops it is time to listen - to ourselves, to others who think about cricket, to still others who do not think about cricket except to wonder how and why it has made such a mess of itself.

The slow burning truth is finally in full flame: the money cricket makes for a slippery few has become more important than cricket itself. Gone is the sham that those who run cricket do so for the good of the game. Cricket is naked in its vulnerability while its emperors parade clothes of obscene opulence. Anyone who believes otherwise must have been watching football while the Big Three swallowed the Small Seven with the cold efficiency of a python.

No-one who knows their way around the ICC could expect this old-fashioned gentleman’s club to raise a stick to the snake, much less behead it. Similarly, the national boards who tried to sell the idea that they were opposed to the restructure were in fact hoping to make enough noise to force the Big Three to toss them a concessionary bone before they would shut up and await their swallowing.

Cricket South Africa (CSA) looked especially pathetic when, having been the first of the dissenters, they shut up and thought of their bank balance being restored to fatness, which would follow their patched up relations with India. Being swallowed, integrity and all, was a reasonable price apparently. But the hollow posturing did not fool many in South Africa. We know CSA do not do what they say they will and do what they have said they will not.

Yet we also know that when they are not floundering in the big pond of the ICC boardroom, sacking Ray Jennings in the afterglow of his under-19 team winning the World Cup, or trying to bully or co-opt the press, CSA do good work. They have sincere zeal to protect and nurture the flame of cricket that has flickered in black communities for a century and more. Sponsors have been signed despite the damage caused by the IPL bonus scandal that claimed the career of CSA’s former chief executive, Gerald Majola. A businesslike buzz hovers over their ever more ambitious projects and expanding systems.

Much of the above will resonate with the citizens of the unboundaried nation of cricket around the world. No committee gets everything right and few get everything wrong. Usually, they muddle through and we hope they do more right than they do wrong. Collectives do not work perfectly, but we put up with them in the absence of a better way to get things done. However, dictatorships work only for the dictator. Cricket has lived under a dictatorship since England and Australia called the shots. Now it has voted to legislate a different dictatorship, which it allowed to take power several years ago. Shame, forever, on this stupid game.

Clarity comes when the ground freezes, the rain refuses to stop and pitches are not prepared lest they be puddings. Yes, here in South Africa, we have no cricket. No, that does not mean we no longer know what the suits did last summer.

Their actions stink in the memory even as the county season goes gently into that good afternoon and the IPL rages hard across the night sky.

One day, because of what they have done and the wrongheaded decisions that must follow, the season will be over - everywhere.