Cricket’s broken, but who can say what’s wrong and how to fix it?

● You didn’t hear it here first — domestic cricket is broken. Few follow it, fewer play it, no one loves it. Worse, it doesn’t do what it should, which is prepare players for international level.

“The gulf between domestic cricket and international cricket is wide,” Ottis Gibson said during a press conference just days ago.

No one disagreed — they wouldn’t. Many present had heard umpteen versions of that sentiment and no doubt voiced their own.

Gibson is Bajan but he knows of whence he speaks, having played 86 first-class and list A games for Border, Gauteng and Griqualand West between 1992 and 2001.

Or does he, considering he has no playing or coaching experience in the franchise system that has been South Africa’s premier domestic cricket since 2004-05?

Yes, because Gibson wasn’t part of the game here between 2001 and August last year, when he was appointed Proteas coach.

So he hasn’t fallen victim to boiled frog syndrome, which happens when you don’t notice creeping adverse change until it’s too late to deploy a remedy.

That’s others’ problem to wrestle with and they should be grateful that Gibson and his fresh eyes have arrived to alert them.

So far, so agreed. We’re all on the same page. But what if all involved, Gibson included, are looking at the wrong page?

South Africa have handed out 13 debuts across the formats this season. Eight of them — two each to Aiden Markram, Lungi Ngidi and Heinrich Klaasen, one each to Junior Dala and Christiaan Jonker — have gone to players who look like they belong in Proteas shirts of one or more flavours.

Eight out of 13 is a success rate of 61.5% — not an absolute win but not indicative of a broken system.

So, can we continue to say that domestic cricket is broken?

The kink in the logic is that it’s largely because of Gibson that so many players have been elevated this season, presumably because he doesn’t trust the domestic system to tell him if they’re good enough.

Thus he has them thrown in at the deep end to see if they can swim.

Never-been past glories

Eight times out of 13, they’ve been able to, not least because of the skill and experience they’ve gained playing domestic cricket.

Is the domestic system failing the national set-up as much as the latter says it is, or does the former deserve more respect from the national set-up?

As we are dealing with South African cricket, contending agendas on the issue are on the loose beneath the surface.

There are those who want “a return to strength-versus-strength”. Can they define what that is, and when it was that cricket in South Africa was in this state of grace?

It wasn’t before the 1990s, when the law forbade South Africa’s best cricketers from playing with or against each other. So how can we know what constituted strength?

Others are pushing a radical race agenda that might yet, who knows, see the imposition of a pigmentation scale to cast as separate (but equal, of course) those black Africans who are blacker than others.

Something’s broken. But we can’t fix it till we know what. Then we can work on how.