Proteas bosses have much to learn from Bok success
The festive break put not just plenty of egg on my face for questioning the workability of rugby at Christmas, it also answered the question as to why the SA national rugby team habitually rules the world while their cricketing counterparts are perennial also-rans.
To answer that question in a nutshell, it’s down to the yawning chasm between the respective administrations; to rugby’s determination to put the national team and the Springbok brand first, whereas their cricketing counterparts sacrifice the national interest for the cause of a domestic league.
Ironically, it was while sitting at Newlands watching the Proteas collapse to 55 all out that I read former Australian captain Steve Waugh’s concern about the SA administration’s decision to send a second or third-string team to New Zealand for Test cricket.
It was a difficult wicket to bat on, there’s no denying that, but the consensus of the people sitting around me was that the South Africans would have been much better off had they had a more experienced spine to their middle-order batting.
What the series against India proved was that when the experienced Dean Elgar and Aiden Markram, dug in they could provide glue to the batting. When they are out early, you get what you got at Newlands. While that was the lowest total since 1932, there have been quite a few around the 100 mark in the past few years.
RINGFENCING
So how do you get experience? You get it by playing Test cricket. That world cricket’s governing body, by allowing the ringfencing that appears to have happened around the big three of India, England and Australia, is mostly responsible for the lack of Test experience in the Proteas team is beyond debate. Waugh’s criticisms appeared to be aimed in that direction.
But that SA’s administrators passed up the opportunity to get their Test cricketers two games in New Zealand that would help build experience is not only disgraceful and an insult to those of us fans who do support the Proteas in home Tests (and Centurion and Newlands showed there are still plenty of us), it is also short-sighted.
It tells you everything you need to know about why the Springbok brand soars and connects the nation to it in a way the Proteas can only dream about. Can you imagine Rassie Erasmus taking an understrength team to overseas rugby Tests so that his top players could play for the Stormers, Bulls or Sharks? Laughable!
When Rassie did pick an understrength team for a game against Wales in Bloemfontein in 2022 for the perfectly good motive of building depth for the World Cup, he was pilloried by fans and some critics. But doing it to build for the future of the national team is one thing, doing it to benefit a franchise competition is quite another. It wouldn’t happen in rugby as the Springbok brand is too important to undermine. It is everything.
There have been times when the rugby franchises have been relegated to second place too much. For instance, the blanket resting of players, many of whom had hardly played at the World Cup, worked against the Sharks in November.
Had their two Bok scrumhalves been available to them, they might have won their first home game against Connacht and their season might have turned out differently. But, hey, the country celebrated another World Cup triumph under Rassie. The national team first policy clearly works.
FINANCIAL PROBLEMS
I am not oblivious to the financial problems, mostly of the cricket administration’s own making, that prompted Proteas Test coach Shukri Conrad to say that without the SA20 there would be no Test cricket.
But does that competition require all the Proteas players to be present for it to thrive? There are many United Rugby Championship (URC) games played understrength in front of sizeable crowds. And local teams don’t have international marquee players playing for them in the URC.
For whom would most South Africans prefer to see Kagiso Rabada bowl? I’ve asked many people this question since the Newlands debacle. Not one has said they’d prefer Rabada to be playing for MI Cape Town rather than the Proteas. Indeed, many of those who watched the SA20 last year didn’t even remember that Cape Town was the team he played for.
Which speaks to my own experience. Last year I went to watch the SA20 for the unique experience of watching Jofra Archer bowling to Jos Buttler. Had the national team gone ahead with the ODI series against Australia that was scheduled to be played at the same time, it would not have stopped me going to the SA20.
Indeed, watching the ODI series on TV might have fed the interest in the domestic 20-over league. That’s a logic understood by our rugby administrators, who recognise that a successful Bok team grows the interest lower down. Clearly not by the cricket bosses.