‘Fires everywhere’ as SA cricket on cusp of crisis
● If all there was to cricket was what happened on the field, the game in South Africa would seem to be in a good place.
Eight wins from 10 tests this summer, five against giants Australia and India, would look like success on any balance sheet.
But those facts and figures paper over deep cracks that have put cricket in South Africa on the cusp of a crisis.
Cricket South Africa’s memorandum of understanding with the South African Cricketers’ Association (Saca), which governs the relationship between the board and the players, expires at the end of April. If no new agreement is reached in the next 16 days most of the country’s professionals will be out of work on May 1.
“We have still not finalised the MOU,” Saca chief executive Tony Irish said. “We are two-and-a-half weeks away from the end of the month and we’re extremely concerned.”
It should be obvious that without players there can be no cricket, but insiders say CSA are ignoring the issue — along with a host of others. “They’re just not engaging and there are fires burning everywhere,” a senior administrator said.
That they declined to be named, despite voicing legitimate concerns without the implication that they could do a better job, tells us plenty about the seriousness of the situation. “There’s a fire burning on the [postponed] T20 Global League: they said they would have a model by the end of March, but don’t know anything about what’s going to happen,” said the administrator.
“There’s still the issue with Haroon [Lorgat], the issue with Altaaf [Kazi] and Clive [Eksteen], the issue with Saca.
“There’s lots of fires and just no engagement — there’s just nothing happening.”
Lorgat’s handling of the planning for the stillborn T20 league cost him his position as CSA’s chief executive, and Kazi and Eksteen — the organisation’s communications head and commercial manager — were suspended after they posed for a photograph with St George’s Park spectators wearing masks that denigrated David Warner’s wife.
Kazi resigned and has since been appointed South African Tourism’s general manager for global public relations. An update on Eksteen’s status is expected this week.
Lorgat’s settlement has not been agreed, so he is still being paid his salary despite leaving his post at the end of September.
But those problems are minor compared with what would happen should almost all of the country’s professionals be out of contract at the end of April. Historically CSA and Saca have enjoyed as healthy a relationship as an employer and trade union could have.
But, as a stalwart suit said, “things have changed quite radically” between the two organisations.
“It’s going to end up in one big problem,” an administrator said. “We’re in a desperate fight all the time to retain our players in the face of other options, not just in England, but in the T20 leagues all over the world.
“You can become a Chris Gayle or a Dwayne Bravo and just be a hired gun all around the world; that’s a much easier life.
“You make more money, you have less pressure, you don’t have the same commitments, you don’t have the media scrutiny on you all the time from a performance point of view. This kind of stuff does not help.”
This kind of stuff extends to the fact that Saca hold the players’ intellectual property rights in trust. So, without a new MOU, neither CSA nor any of the country’s six franchises would be allowed to use the players’ images in their marketing campaigns.
CSA’s apparent non-engagement seems to extend to the press: their president, Chris Nenzani, did not respond to questions.
We’re in a desperate fight . . . to retain our players Anonymous A senior cricket administrator