Our feel-good moments need to be more enduring
● The sight of Kagiso Rabada and Lungi Ngidi bowling in tandem in Centurion warmed hearts as it soothed eyes last week.
They are poster boys for the value of a first-class education and the honing of skill on carefully manicured fields.
“Temba Bavuma says it emphatically, if he didn’t go to a school with the necessary facilities and coaching he would never have made it,” said Cricket South Africa's (CSA) transformation manager Max Jordaan.
“That is the socioeconomic reality of the country. Sport is a microcosm of our society,” said Jordaan.
Political emancipation may have happened more than 20 years ago, but a large swathe of South Africa's black population remain enslaved economically.
Producing an international sportsman comes with a huge price tag and CSA have to find ways of widening the existing pathways to the national team. Moreover, national federations are under increasing pressure to be more representative.
According to CSA’s statistics from unification in 1991 to 2017, 71% of players who have represented the national team were white. Of the remaining 29% only 8% were black African.
“You hear people saying that the team playing now is the team of the minister. What I would like to know is, whose team played before unity,” Jordaan asked while pointing to Centurion’s playing surface this week.
“There has been a lot of black people being taken for granted. If you want to do a head count please tell me the name of a player who was non-deserving of being here today.”
A feel-good moment
While the exploits of Ngidi and Rabada no doubt inspire a feel-good moment, Jordaan has been around long enough to know transformation remains a divisive issue.
“Even today the number of white players who are selected is 71%. How long can this persist? The white population is around 10% and that percentage will drop. For us transformation has to be sustainable. You also have to make sure that other players don’t feel that there is no place for them.”
Thabang Moroe, acting CSA chief executive, admits there are holes in the net with which they harness talent. He wants to bolster club cricket so that it too can produce provincial cricketers.
First though, they have to try to retain talent already in the pipeline. “We've introduced a few interventions on top of the ones we’ve always had. We have to give players support,” said Moroe.
“We can do more for grass-roots cricket, especially for township women's cricket. When it comes to grass-roots cricket we need to look at our affiliates.”
One of Jordaan's priorities is to ensure that the journey between CSA’s 63 hubs (for specifically identified talent) and provincial cricket is travelled more frequently.
“Interventions are therefore required within our structures, especially when you look at the condition of sport facilities at the country's 27 000 schools. Also, we have to be realistic and prioritise because 15% of the population lives on less than R20 a day.
“At what stage is it possible to engage in sport with 36% of the population unemployed?” ● “Of course it isn’t true,” was among the first things Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) media officer told this reporter on April 7, 2000 — the day Hansie Cronje was charged by the Delhi police for his dealings with cricket’s gambling underworld.
Of course, all who heard Kyle Abbott profess his commitment to South Africa on December 23 2016 believed him — until January 5 last year, when he confirmed he had signed a Kolpak deal with Hampshire.
Of course, a report in the Mumbai Mirror this week quoting Albert Morkel — father of Albie and Morne — as saying, in essence, that white players were being worked out of the game in South Africa was rubbished.
Anything else would challenge what has become cricket’s dominant narrative in this country: that it must be darkened at all costs if it is to have a future of any significance.
That is, of course, true. From junior to test level, cricket needs more black players if it is to survive as part of South Africa’s culture and prosper in the international arena.
But keeping those black players in the system, while doing right by everyone else, is made fiendishly difficult by the hard truth that teams are limited to 11 players and by the intense competition for black talent in other sport and business spheres.
A black administrator nailed the dilemma this week: “We can’t have players in the national team who are not good enough, which is not fair to anyone — especially those players. And we can’t not have black players coming into the national team.”
Another black administrator described