The suits have lost, with little hope of regaining it, the confidence of South Africa’s top players.
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
“IT’S a fucking circus,” a senior South Africa player told your columnist last week. And he wasn’t Dean Elgar, who could find a way to moan about a rainbow.
The player wasn’t talking about the traffic, the economy or the mess Eskom have made of their only job: keeping the lights on.
He was talking about how Cricket South Africa (CSA) are running the game in our country. Rather, not running the game anything like properly. Or presiding over a meltdown of the game as we have come to know it.
The player’s opinion is not unusual. Where two or more cricket people are gathered in the name of talking about this bloody game, views on the sorry state of the circus are aired sooner and more passionately than anything else.
They are fuelled by the kind of thing that reached these ears last week — that certain service providers were told they had landed contracts to work on this year’s Mzansi Super League (MSL) while procurement of the same services was still, officially, underway.
Asked to confirm whether this was the case and, if so, why that had happened, a CSA spokesperson said only: “It is against the policy of CSA to discuss the terms of our relationships with our suppliers, outside the span of the confidentiality of such terms.”
Note, in that statement, the lack of a denial of what should be regarded as a serious breach of procedure. Or even of alarm at the implications.
That’s bad enough, but we have reached a significantly more telling point in the dwindling of cricket in South Africa when even national players — the people at the pinnacle, who are exponentially removed from the nonsense everyone else in the game has to put up with from the suits — are fed up enough to vent, spontaneously, at reporters.
Players invariably have a low opinion of administrators, and the more successful the players the less they tend to think of their administrators. But the former tolerate the latter — not least because they aren’t sure what, exactly, all those pen pushers do. Who knows? It might just be useful.
South Africa’s players would seem to have passed that point. They look at the emperors and they see no clothes.
These are dangerous days for CSA. It’s one thing to anger the public with your performance, or the press, or to proceed with the stupidity that is the MSL.
Or to push the South African Cricketers’ Association to the point where they launch court cases and formal disputes against you.
Or to have to face a legal challenge from the Western Province Cricket Association, one of the jewels in your crown, or to suspend three of your senior executives.
But it is quite another to lose, with little hope of regaining it, the confidence of the top tier of players.
Gerald Majola understood that, as did Haroon Lorgat. Accordingly they ensured they kept the national players onside. Does the incumbent CSA chief executive, Thabang Moroe, understand that tenet of his role?
On the basis of how those players, the pillars propping up a struggling industry, appear to see things, not at all.
He will know that, notwithstanding their firm grasp of the reality of their situation, neither Majola nor Lorgat left CSA in the best of circumstances.
Moroe should know that the noises he has been making about closing the separation that has opened between the Proteas and the rest of the game have been noted, and none too favourably.
The national players believe that gap insulates them from the effects of CSA’s failures, and they will do their damnedest to retain it. Indeed, attempts to narrow it will only make them build their dressingroom walls still higher.
And that’s not a good idea. The fact that the elite players consider themselves a breed apart explains, at least partly, why they are reluctant to turn out for their franchises.
But CSA need to know that they will come second if they take on their only viable assets in a fight for supremacy: you don’t take a suit to a pitch battle.
Or send the clowns into the ring with the lions.
First published by the Sunday Times.
Both sides are at fault. Even if the players do not like what the administrators are doing they can connect with the domestic players. That protea fire culture not only has Graeme Smith's values but also his clique forming nature. It will always be troublesome that way. The administrators are not worth any assessment now.