Proteas take giant leap towards racial equality
Haroon Lorgat is a man on a mission. The chief executive of Cricket South Africa (CSA) wants to drive rapid change, pushing the game into areas of society where it has traditionally not been played and unlocking untapped talent, at the same time as preserving the national team’s excellence. It is a tricky balancing act.
Most cricket administrators are time-servers, either hamstrung by the sclerotic nature of the game’s traditional committee-based organisation, or simply happy to coast along. Lorgat is not one of those: he found himself out of a job when he tried to force through radical governance change as chief executive of the ICC, and now at CSA finds himself at the sharp end of criticism from those who believe that his drive for transformation threatens the future of the game.
There are other challenges too. South Africa has always lost domestic players to England and elsewhere, but the weak rand, which is likely to weaken further still, will encourage more. The uneven distribution of ICC funds also threatens countries such as South Africa, which finds itself at the mercy of the big three who control the game – India, England and Australia. There is a lot at stake.
He is in a feisty mood when we speak, emboldened perhaps by the sight of Temba Bavuma, the young black African batsman making an inspiring maiden hundred at Newlands. ‘‘We have faced the challenge [of losing players] for a long time, and that is why we have had to transform the game by pushing it into less traditional areas. For us, it was a long-term sustainability issue. We had no choice but to try and broaden cricket’s appeal across the entire spectrum, as we had always selected from such a narrow base. It was unsustainable.
‘‘Transformation has not only been a black and white issue. The game was previously only really played by the English-speaking white population.
‘‘I would argue that transformation has benefited the Afrikaner community as well. Someone like Dale Steyn might not have come to the fore without transformation as he comes from an area where cricket was never previously played.’’
The issue of quotas is always in the background. Lorgat is pushing aggressively at provincial level as the quotas stipulate that each team must have six non-white players, three of whom must be black Africans. Despite the disquiet among the white cricketing community, Lorgat is unrepentant about this, but is also adamant that there remains no written or formal quota for the national team, who, he insists, will continue to be picked on merit.
‘‘I can categorically state that there are no targets or quotas in the national team. I get very annoyed when people continually claim that there are when we have agreements and paperwork with the ministry of sport to show that there are not. There are certainly targets in the system, and we want to encourage that, but we want the best players for the national team, otherwise it would be self-defeating.
‘‘You only have to go back to [Hashim] Amla and people said initially that he was a quota selection. I was the convenor of selectors at the time and he was picked on merit, but people who made those claims back then never go back and apologise or correct themselves. Amla had been pencilled in since being one of our best under-19 prospects.
‘‘Similarly, many of the other players who have proved themselves – Ashwell Prince, Makhaya Ntini, Charl Langeveldt and many others – were selected because they had a right to be there.
‘‘On the other hand, our policy does also state that if there is a choice between two players and if the selectors cannot make their minds up and one is white and one is black, then they must go for the black player. That’s the kind of promotion that we seek to achieve.’’
And so to Kyle Abbott’s nonselection for the World Cup semi-final last year, which, rumours had it, so upset some players within the South Africa team that a boycott was mooted. ‘‘We have these challenges from time to time. Whenever the detractors see an opportunity, they will latch on to it and that was one such moment. The selectors believed that [Vernon] Philander was the first choice and was fit, and in New Zealand conditions they went with him. I was there, and there was no question about people pulling out of the match.’’
Is the priority a successful or truly representative team?
‘‘The two are obviously not mutually exclusive. It will take us time to be representative, but we will not get there by forgoing the best players playing.
‘‘I have never received a call from the minister to say you must do this or that, but obviously we meet and talk about transformation at great length and how we are going to achieve our goals, but I never get pressurised.’’
Shortly after we speak, Bavuma scores his hundred and is embraced by Kagiso Rabada and the image of two young black cricketers embracing in a test match against England is manna from heaven for CSA. But these two cricketers went to elite schools, the equivalent of Eton and Harrow in South Africa, so they are not exactly representative of the vast majority.
Lorgat emphasises the need to maintain and encourage that existing pathway, whereby talented young black cricketers are fast-tracked and given scholarships at elite schools, while at the same time expanding the game’s reach for the rest.
‘‘We discovered that most young talented black cricketers were studying, trying to play cricket and going to work to put food on the table and the pressures were too great. So we help in that regard with educational trusts, by paying to put them on scholarships and provide a bit extra so they don’t have to go out and work. That will continue. But we have also moved to put systems in place to expand our reach, through a tripartite agreement signed last year with the sport and education ministries and ourselves to provide and support focus schools in disadvantaged communities to unlock potential there.
‘‘We have seen the number of black kids who now want to take up the game and one of the challenges we have had in our pipeline is the dropout rate.
‘‘The success of our programmes is to some extent linked with economic advancement of that section of society as well.’’
And, perhaps therefore, linked to the allocation of resources of the world game, at present skewed unfairly in favour of India, England and Australia as well. Is Lorgat angry about that?
‘‘That’s factual. There are seven full members who are angry. But it was very refreshing when [Shashank] Manohar came in [as ICC chairman]. And I’m very optimistic that things will change for the better now.’’
With all these challenges, is he optimistic about the future of South African cricket? ‘‘I’m more optimistic than when I started.
‘‘We have proposed a whole new operating model, which all franchises have bought into. Before that everyone would have been recording losses and now by the end of the financial year, we expect everyone to be profitable.’’
More days like the one at Newlands, with Bavuma proving the case conclusively that he is there on merit rather than on favouritism, will help more than anything else.