Leading Edge: Domestic cricket faces bleak reality

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

BEING disabused of a notion is never pleasant if the idea is held dear. But sometimes it has to be done. This is one of those times: SA’s franchise system is not as strong it thinks it is.

For this, we have the Cobras and the Dolphins to thank. Rather, we should thank their opponents in the Champions League T20 - the teams who made the SA sides look like they were out of their league in their first four games.

The argument that the South Africans came in cold from their off-season does not hold because three of the sides who beat them did, too - New Zealand’s Northern Districts, the Perth Scorchers and the Hobart Hurricanes.

Neither does it wash that SA’s players are not familiar with the conditions. Most of them have played in the sub-continent before, and if that were true it would also apply to the three Australasian teams above.

Worse yet, after those games, the only victories celebrated by Northern Districts, Perth and the Chennai Super Kings had came at the expense of SA teams.

It needed an eliminator over to earn a first SA victory: the Cobras prevailed by one run against the Barbados Tridents in Mohali on Friday.

Even though these truths have made themselves evident in a tournament of no great relevance based on a format that cannot be taken seriously except as a measure of how awful kit design can become and in which the prizemoney is much more impressive than the level of play, they add up to the bleak reality that SA’s domestic structures are less sound than those in other countries.

That is what South Africans need to countenance if they expect representatives of that structure to hold their own in the great out there of competing against their far-flung peers. But if the sole function of franchise cricket is to unearth and incubate international players, SA is doing just fine.

Cricket’s best test team did not fall out of the sky readymade, and SA’s star players fetch top dollar at the Indian Premier League auction as well as in the less overtly mercenary world of county cricket. Much of the credit for those successes belongs to a domestic game that, if SA win the World Cup, would deserve all the accolades it would not receive.

But South Africans who dip their interest in cricket into the domestic scene will discover a cold, impoverished pond. Shots and appeals echo around desolate grounds in the first-class and one-day competitions, and there is surely no more mournful sound than the now standard applause from the field that follows almost every delivery that is not hit to or over the boundary rippling outward towards the stands rather than inward from an appreciative audience.

Twenty years ago, SA’s newspapers - this one in particular - devoted hundreds of words to every domestic first-class match. No more. Live coverage of proper cricket at anything below test level has disappeared from television screens. Are broadcasters who hold lucrative contracts to put international cricket on television offering franchise games pro bono?

Viewership figures can be nudged this way and that, but there was no misreading the awkwardness of the biggest crowd at Newlands during the cheesy T20 extravaganza mounted at Newlands at New Year in lieu of real games - which the brattish Indians had refused to play - turning up to watch the Springboks.

That’s right: more people seem to be interested in seeing the national rugby team play cricket than seeing the nation’s best cricketers play cricket. Scary, but true.