Thabang Moroe is fast becoming the Donald Trump of sports administrators. Everything he touches turns to chaos.
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
“STAND back,” Adam says to Eve with a loinward glance. “I don’t know how big this thing gets.” You could tell the same joke about cricket in SA. In reverse.
Just how small can the game get in our country? It’s a question asked with concern and sadness, and not a little anger, in the wake of another few days of self-inflicted organisational damage in the scrapyard Cricket SA (CSA) seems determined to become.
Rather than drag the Mzansi Super League (MSL) onto the SABC’s screens from Friday, CSA would do better to offer for broadcast the footage from whatever cameras they have in their offices.
The state broadcaster loves a tawdry soap opera, and CSA’s brand of unreality television would grip the nation far more readily than their comparatively dowdy donkey of a T20 tournament.
CSA have finally coughed up the R2.4-million they owed the players from last year’s MSL for the use of their commercial rights.
Sounds like good news. Sort of. Except that the SA Cricketers’ Association (SACA) had to go to the lengths of lodging a formal dispute — and forcing a settlement that had to be paid in three days — to get their money.
Sounds bad enough. Except that CSA made things worse by suspending three of their most senior administrators in an apparent attempt to lay blame for what had gone wrong.
Sounds worrying enough. Except that SACA gave cricketminded South Africans an idea of how much more they should be worried by saying they hadn’t dealt with one of the suspended officials and that the other two had been helping them resolve the issue.
Sounds worse than we thought. Except that it’s even worse. CSA have not, we hear, explained to at least two of the officials their reasons for taking action against them. The suspendees, having been shot in this movie before, have “covered their backsides on this internally”, according to a solid source. Consequently the officials’ “lawyers are all over it”.
SACA made clear that, rather than the three suspended suits, the focus of their frustration was CSA chief executive Thabang Moroe, who is fast becoming the Donald Trump of sports administrators in the public eye. As in it seems everything he touches turns to chaos.
And all that while CSA are trying to get their remaining major sponsors, Standard Bank and Momentum, to sign new deals for more of the same.
What would you do, gentle reader, if you had heaped all this trouble on your own head?
How about high tail it to beautiful, peaceful, luxurious, expensive Zimbali for the weekend?
No! Yes. CSA have taken their staff off to the larney coastal resort north of Durban for a “team-building session”. How much team-building can you do when most of the people in the room work under the managers you have suspended?
But wait. There’s more. On Friday CSA released a statement that included a farcical assurance that “while the management deals with corporate issues around operational functions that are normal in organisations from time to time” the money-bleeding MSL would go ahead as scheduled. Then came the cryptic line: “To dispel any uncertainty, a schedule of the opening matches is included, as well as a list of all the players, who have already been drafted and are eagerly anticipating the tournament.”
Who knew there was any uncertainty to dispel about the MSL? So CSA had to be asked whether the tournament was in danger of being called off, prompted entirely by their own suggestion that the theory was out there that the plug could yet be pulled.
A spokesperson couldn’t see the problem: “I re-read it and to me it simply sounds like an intention to reassure cricket fans that they have a date with MSL. Our responsibility is to the fans of cricket and the lovers of cricket, whom we cannot disappoint.”
The MSL could have been a Garden of Eden for a society that too often gets snagged on horror headlines about vicious crime and a failing economy.
Instead it represents everything that is wrong with SA cricket. Its innocence has been wasted. We’ve bitten into the apple of reality. We know too much to enjoy it.
First published by the Sunday Times.
Administrators on a Holiday ?? when that news gets to SACA they will roast CSA properly. I don't see a holiday doing the cost-cutting CSA want by expanding the domestic game to 12 provinces.