Members End: Strange bedfellows and Srini

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

Members End is surprised that so many people have taken Fikile Mbalula’s decree of a 60% black quota in SA’s teams so seriously. This is the blowhard who told us that “whatever the retired judge recommends I will implement” when he launched the Nicholson investigation into Cricket SA’s (CSA) bonus scandal. Mbalula did no such thing and the supposedly restructured CSA bears little resemblance to what Nicholson recommended. Then Mbalula announced, to great fanfare, that Floyd Mayweather Jnr. was coming to SA to do great things for boxing. When that promise turned out to be worth less than the hot air it arrived on - how can anyone claim to be on a boxing pilgrimage to this country and snub the Eastern Cape? - Mbalula smartly nudged the spotlight in another direction by calling Bafana a “bunch of losers”, nevermind that we knew that already. So, how the hell can we believe you this time, minister? But this we believe: on May 7, South Africans will go to the polls. Among them will be millions who wonder how and why sports like cricket have failed so miserably to bring more black talent to the international stage despite having had decades to make their national teams look like the nation. Ah, politics. And sport, of course. Bedfellows forever.

Oh, to have had a stump mic in the room when that wicked wizard of the wicket, that brute of a bouncer, cricket’s own Darth Vader - one Narayanaswami Srinivasan - took his seat at the high table set for the International Cricket Council (ICC) board meeting in Dubai this week. despised by legions in the game and banned from performing his duties as president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India by that country’s Supreme Court pending an investigation into illegal betting in the Indian Premier League, it would appear Srinivasan’s fellow suits on the ICC board allowed him to behave as if nary a pinstripe was out of place. Who are these monsters? How did they hijack cricket? When do they go back to their own planets?

Northamptonshire were pissed off to be given less than a week’s notice that an injured knee had forced Rory Kleinveldt out of his stint with them. “Rory was due to arrive in the UK on Wednesday and the late decision by CSA is extremely disappointing,” the county hissed on Friday. Poms. Whinging. Bedfellows forever.