Spotlights follow the money, get trained on SA20 tournament
For the next month, or at least fortnight, let there be no talk of Test cricket’s demise or the fortunes of the makeshift squad heading to New Zealand in a couple of weeks for a World Test Championship assignment. Now is the time of the SA20. It only gets 30 days a year, so let’s give it all of our spotlights.
The SA20 “remains the biggest prize in SA cricket with a [sic] total prize money R70m on offer for Season 2”, one of the many recent releases from the Cape Town head office reminded us.
“The winners of the competition … are set to walk away with a handsome R34m. The runners-up will claim a R16.25m share of the prize money, with third and fourth receiving R8.9m and R7.85m respectively. Fifth and sixth place will also receive R2.5m and R2.0m each.”
Money makes the world go around, especially the cricket world. The hardest-working people in cricket since the inaugural season of the SA20 may be the management and promotions team behind SA’s game-saving domestic T20 competition.
It is likely that I missed a couple, but there are 68 press releases in my inbox since the first tournament ended 11 months ago. That in itself is an output worth applauding. A month-long tournament requires staff working hard for all 12 months of the year. I doubted it at first, but it’s true.
Some of the information was publicity puff but much of it was announcing new supplier partnerships, sponsorships, broadcasting deals and ticket sales. Commissioner Graeme Smith, his right-hand man Stephen Cook and their team have not stopped working. And here we finally are, ready for the second season, which begins with the defending champions, Sunrisers Eastern Cape, welcoming the Jo’burg Super Kings to St George’s Park on Wednesday.
There will be more cameras, with more angles, than ever before. SuperSport, as nominally the second-biggest shareholder (behind Cricket SA) but the only one capable of holding things together and achieving the dream of “secondbiggest behind the IPL [Indian Premier League]”, is holding nothing back. This will be its biggest production ever.
Apart from broadcasting every word the umpires say during play, it has announced a commentary and presentation team of 17. Seventeen. And a permanent camera so you can see them all the time. Also, a couch on the boundary’s edge where some of them will sit to provide that perspective.
But back to the money. Tony de Zorzi was scheduled to open the batting and captain the Test team to New Zealand, but 10 minutes before the squad was announced, the Durban Super Giants (DSG) released a statement confirming him as their latest recruit. As a replacement for injured fast bowler Kyle Abbott.
Abbott was purchased in the player auction in the basement bracket of R175k, but that doesn’t necessarily mean De Zorzi will be paid the same. SA20’s regulations stipulate that a replacement player can “negotiate” his fee between the bracket of the player he is replacing and the next highest — R750k in this case.
Those negotiations, and the resultant price, were “confidential”, says the SA20, which is peculiar given that the millions of rand paid for Tristan Stubbs and Marco Jansen and others were exactly the headline-grabbing stories the SA20 marketeers wanted when the initial auction took place.
As I have written many times in this space, the IPL franchises in the SA20 are in the business of big business, not the philanthropic wellbeing of SA cricket. If the SA20 does actually “save” SA cricket from financial oblivion, it will be with the cash generated by big business, not goodwill.
Heinrich Klaasen retired from Test cricket on Tuesday. The Proteas’ next Test assignment after New Zealand is in the Caribbean in August, when The Hundred will be played in England. And Klaasen stands to earn around R2.5m. He might have expected around R250k for a two-Test tour. Who wouldn’t retire in such circumstances?
“It’s a difficult decision that I have made because it is by far my favourite format of the game,” Klaasen said. “The battles that I faced on and off the field have made me the cricketer I am today. It has been a great journey and I am glad I could have represented my country. My baggy Test cap is the most precious cap I have ever been handed.”
Although he hasn’t said so publicly, De Zorzi would most certainly have preferred to play two Tests in New Zealand than sit on DSG’s bench for a month, which is almost certainly what he will do given the existing strength of their batting line-up. That tour, too, is worth around R250k. DSG may have agreed to match it, but he is just as likely to have agreed to an amount closer to the Abbott fee.
Which just goes to show: it’s not just the players earning 10 times as much for T20 cricket who are turning their backs on the format they love the most, it is also those who dare not risk upsetting teams who might pay them a lot of money in the future.