“The reality is Imtiaz [Patel] doesn’t like Haroon [Lorgat] and he doesn’t respect him.”
Sunday Times*
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
THERE was either US$13-million or US$17-million worth of difference between Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) vision for their T20 league and SuperSport’s last year, but that might not be why the original attempt to tap into the game’s fastest growing market foundered.
For that, we need to go back 10 years, when Haroon Lorgat and Imtiaz Patel were both in the running to replace Malcolm Speed as the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) chief executive.
“The ICC approached Imtiaz and asked him to apply, and they wanted to give him the job,” a Patel confidante said. “In fact, [then ICC chair] David Morgan jumped the gun and said live on Sky that Imtiaz was the ICC’s next chief executive. But Imtiaz had turned them down.
“He was on a plane to Cape Town to meet with executives from Naspers [which ultimately owns SuperSport] when Morgan appeared on Sky, and it could have have been a very awkward situation — ‘You’re here talking to us but we see you’re leaving …’
“Imtiaz went to Haroon and said, ‘I don’t want this job — do you want it?’ Haroon said he did.”
Asked to confirm that version of events, Lorgat did not respond.
So Patel continued his career as a SuperSport executive. Lorgat cracked the nod with the ICC and was appointed in April 2008.
It only complicated the relationship between CSA and SuperSport when Lorgat was appointed the former’s chief executive in July 2013. By then Patel was MultiChoice South Africa’s group chief executive.
But the bitterness between them has lingered all these years — and perhaps was a factor in SuperSport balking at how much money CSA wanted in rights fees for the tournament, which was postponed in October and is set to be played next season.
“Imtiaz said outright he wasn’t going to pay what CSA wanted as long as Haroon was around,” a source close to the process said.
The failure to secure a broadcaster and sponsors, and the consequent impending losses, duly prompted CSA to pull the plug on the competition in October — weeks before the first ball was to have been bowled.
Depending on who you believe, Lorgat’s hasty departure from CSA in September was either punishment for what had gone wrong or carefully engineered by his adversaries.
CSA’s next step was to negotiate an equity partnership with SuperSport for a new tournament, which has angered the owners of the original franchises enough for three of the eight to threaten legal action.
And all because a couple of egos got in the way of making a deal.
“It’s a sexy angle but it’s not the truth,” a source who knows both Lorgat and Patel said.
He said Patel, now the chief executive for video entertainment at Naspers, was no longer involved in rights negotiations for sport events.
But there was more to it than that.
“The reality is Imtiaz doesn’t like Haroon and he doesn’t respect him,” the source said. “But you often end up working with people you don’t like. And that’s not why the rights negotiations for the T20GL failed — they simply couldn’t reach consensus on the numbers.”
What those numbers were is not confirmed. One theory is that CSA wanted US$15-million and that SuperSport offered US$2-million, another that CSA asked for between US$20 and US$25-million and that SuperSport came back with US$6 to US$8-million.
Again depending on who you believe, that’s a degree of difference either US$13-million or US$17-million wide: a long way on both counts.
But SuperSport’s misgivings about the competition went beyond the financials.
“They had doubts about some of the owners,” a broadcasting insider said. “They didn’t know whether they were fronting money-laundering operations or were involved in match-fixing.
“And they couldn’t understand why the franchise owners were foreign. If the money goes back into South African cricket it goes into the product, which would lead to better standards in the domestic game — which have been poor for years — and that would make SuperSport happy because it helps them sell subscriptions.”
He said SuperSport had indemnified themselves against legal action — “Their stance is they were not part of that venture” — and that they were satisfied that the smaller scale competition scheduled to be played next summer was a better fit for the South African cricket landscape.
“As long as the Proteas are available and you have good overseas players, not those at the end of their careers just playing for the paycheque, you will have a good tournament.”
And another thing: “SuperSport have been very impressed with [new CSA chief executive] Thabang Moroe. He’s attracted criticism but he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work.”
There would, then, seem to be fewer degrees of separation between CSA and SuperSport than in the past.
* A shorter version of this article was published in the Sunday Times on July 22, 2018.
Comments
No comments yet. Start the conversation.