Leading Edge: The loneliness of first-class cricket

Its chief function is to produce test players, but it’s a sad truth if that’s its only reason for existing.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

THIRTY-NINE wickets crash in two days. A hattrick transforms a sludge toward stalemate into a whizz-bang win. A kid not yet out of his teens bowls beyond his years on his first-class debut to send his team hurtling to victory.

Two centuries, three five-wicket hauls, four first-ballers, a half-century by a tailender, three innings bristling with three half-centuries each, among 15 in total.

One win by 11 runs, the others by 129 and 255. Not a draw in sight. And that’s just the first round.

What a time to be alive, fellow cricketminded South Africans. What? You missed all that? Too bad. Better luck on Monday, when the same teams will start three more matches.

It used to be called the Howa Bowl and the Currie Cup. These days it has the ugliest name in the game — the “4-Day Franchise Series” — but, last week at least, that didn’t stop it from delivering some of the most exciting cricket you could see.

If only you could see it, of course. That wouldn’t have happened if you were not within reach of Potchefstroom, Centurion and Kimberley. Neither will it this week if you aren’t in or near Bloemfontein, Benoni or Port Elizabeth.

Live coverage of first-class cricket has all but disappeared from television screens around the world, and South Africa is no different.

Many newspapers, too, have long since scrapped serious analysis of every first-class match. These august pages themselves used to brim with hundreds of words of exactly that, Sunday in and Sunday out, all season long.

Once, to do justice to the 800 words allocated to a day’s play at Kingsmead during which three wickets fell and fewer than 200 runs were scored, the Sunday Times correspondent — who was not this columnist — resorted to writing about the inflatable dolphin that had lost its mooring at the ground and, eventually, settled on the 13th green at Durban Country Club.

He knew this because he was an ardent golfer, and had been called by a mate who was in the four-ball that had been startled by the dolphin’s arrival.

The cricket was relegated to the last paragraph or two of his report. Wouldn’t you know it, the available space shrunk — not uncommon in the organically volatile world of newspapering — after our man had submitted his piece, which was cut from the bottom up.

How readers must have scratched their heads through 500 words about an escaped inflatable dolphin and not a line of cricket, not even the score.

Perhaps that was a harbinger of the present, although good luck smuggling a blow-up doll of any sort past the editor.

Thing is, for 10 years and more after South Africa’s return to the international arena, the start of the domestic first-class season used to be a major moment that shone with the promise of the coming summer. Now it hardly registers in the nation’s cricket consciousness. Why?

That most matches will start on Mondays is one important reason, although they were hardly well attended when they stretched over weekends. And the struggle to get bums on seats at tests is only going to be more keenly felt a level lower.

That entry has for years been free is another problem. A sure-fire way to convince people that something is not worth having is to give it to them for nothing. Again, it’s not as if grounds were selling out when spectators needed tickets.

The chief function of first-class cricket is to produce test players, but it’s a sad truth if that’s its only reason for existing.

The fact that CSA apparently haven’t seen fit to investigate why 39 wickets fell in two days in Potch suggests that is the case.

Similarly, the likelihood is that few of us know of Tshepo Moreki, he of the hattrick above, or Gerald Coetzee, just 19 but with six first-class wickets under his belt.

They’re cricketers, too, and they deserve their places in the sun. And in our consciousness.

First published by the Sunday Times.