Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE in Manchester
SOUTH African cricket is not for sissies. The national coach doesn’t know whether he still has a job? Stuff him. Your shiny new T20 tournament is beset by controversy even before the first cheerleader shakes the first pompom? So what.
You can’t find a pair of batsmen who can stick around together for as long as it takes, say, the ANC to make sure they smack each of their MPs upside the head and inform them which way they will vote, with their conscience, of course, in a secret ballot?
Tell them to man the hell up. The batsmen, that is, not the MPs. Although that wouldn’t be bad. Perhaps batsmen and politicians both should woman the hell up, seeing as we can’t seem to get much right in a world controlled from the male side of the gender divide.
Whatever. South Africa’s batsmen need to sort themselves out quickly. Because they will soon be asked the same kind of tough questions they failed to answer acceptably in England.
Not, you would think, by Bangladesh, who will play two tests in South Africa from the end of September. But then India will arrive, followed by Australia.
So South Africa’s batsmen will, by the end of the summer, have faced four of the top five ranked bowlers in the game.
One of them, James Anderson, claimed 20 of their wickets at 14.10 in England. Should India spinners Ravindra Jadeja and Ravichandran Ashwin — admittedly unlikely in South African conditions — and Australia fast bowler Josh Hazlewood — far more likely — jam like Jimmy, expect similarly underwhelming results as those achieved in England.
Fasten your seatbelts, cricket lovers. We could be in for a bumpy summer.
And to think, just more than eight months ago, South Africa were leaving Australia with a test series in the bag and a slew of pissed off Channel Nine “reporters” hounding them through airports.
We can have reasonable confidence that what’s gone wrong on the field will be sincerely addressed, because players make their mistakes in public and have to show in the same space that they have learnt their lesson.
Not so the suits, some of whom have made careers out of saying the right thing for all to hear even as they are doing wrong behind closed boardroom doors.
One senior administrator asked the South African reporters gathered in London for the launch of the Global T20 (GT20) on June 19 whether the tournament was “doable”.
Yes, was the consensus. And it remains so — we know from events like the 2009 Indian Premier League (IPL), which was moved to our country at short notice, that Cricket South Africa know how to get things done.
But how those things are done matters, and the 2009 IPL was done improperly enough for CSA to have to fire their then chief executive for breaking the law to hide millions in bonuses.
Not that CSA did so willingly. After months of dodging bullets they were forced to take action when the pressure mounted. Then they wriggled out of restructuring their board as fully as recommended by a subsequent independent investigation.
Are dodgy deals being done around the GT20? We don’t know, but doesn’t it strike you as odd that several of the former players who attended the London launch hadn’t a clue why they were there or what — if any — their role would be in the tournament? And that some of the owners of the franchises unveiled at the launch have not bothered to answer when asked, by reporters who have heard they have pulled out, whether they are still involved?
No wonder Russell Domingo was smiling at Old Trafford on Monday, despite his team having lost another match and the looming probability of losing his job.
Better out than in, hey, coach?
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