Dolphins drown visiting Cobras in T20GL mess

● You had to give it to the bloke who turned up at Kingsmead on Thursday wearing a snorkel and goggles. Clearly, he had been shot in this movie before.

And he was again. For the fifth time in the six T20s in Durban this season, rain decided the issue.

The match was a semifinal between the Dolphins and the Cobras, and the washout meant the Dolphins advanced to yesterday’s final against the Titans in Centurion by dint of finishing second on the log.

This should have been merely an element of the drama of a competition that wouldn’t have existed had a right royal mess not been made of organising the T20 Global League (T20GL), which was stillborn and replaced by just another franchise tournament.

But audiences were drawn in droves to the second prize. The figures were up in terms of viewership and spectatorship, and that led to increased sponsorship.

It helped that South Africa’s best players were in action, which isn’t often the case at this level, and that the prize money for crowd catches was increased.

Would the T20GL have done better? Who knows, but South African cricket — the suits included — should be giving itself a pat on the back.

Or not. Someone is sure to spill blood on the knives already in that back.

They’re being thrown from Cape Town, and they’ve been coming thick and fast since the Dolphins played the Titans at Kingsmead last Sunday.

The Titans put a far weaker team on the park than usual, as was their right and privilege considering they had by then secured a home semi.

The Dolphins won well enough to earn the bonus point that meant they, not the Cobras, would host the other semi — on Thursday — at dry, sunny Newlands.

Cue the knives, the first of which wondered out loud as it whistled past about the propriety in these match-fixing days of a particular photograph.

The picture was posted on social media the day before the Dolphins beat the Titans. Its caption hoped for a Dolphins victory, and the figures beaming for the camera have been friends for years besides being the chief executives of the Dolphins and the Titans.

Match-fixing? We can never dismiss the possibility, but there are significant suggestions of innocence in this case.

For one thing, the photograph was posted on the Dolphins CEO’s feed — if he wasn’t rooting for his team then the match-fixing argument might have stood. For another, the mafia doesn’t issue receipts — the social media post would be exactly that if something was amiss.

Things went from dumb to dumber on Thursday, when Capetonians counted the number of black players in the Titans for the semi. They found five, or one short.

Queue more knives, which didn’t care that Henry Davids, who is black and would have played, was injured and had to be replaced minutes before the toss.

Capetonians should know that the Titans have outperformed the Cobras in the black African transformation stakes in three of the previous four seasons.

Henry Davids, who is black and would have played, had to be replaced