When cash is involved, CSA do an about-turn

There are – and it becomes obvious when you read comments on social media or the internet – still people in this country who do not believe transformation in sport should be happening.

Within this misguided group there is a range of people – from blatant racists who should have been marching for hate with the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville to those who say there must only be merit selection.

Their mistake is two-fold: Why are they suddenly calling for merit selection now after a century in which it was absolutely absent from our sport and why does transformation automatically exclude merit in their own minds?

Anyway, to counter these people one can point to transformation being absolutely vital for our sport to survive, just in terms of the numbers of players and spectators. But there is no immediate evidence of that, of course, because these figures are actually projections, predictions of a future that common sense says will happen, but we can’t be 100% sure right now.

So we turn to the moral reasons for transformation: that it is the right thing to do. Having denied the majority of the population the right to play before 1992, we can’t now tell them they can’t play because they’re not good enough.

But there is a problem with this approach because Cricket South Africa is guilty of an awful moral relativism when it comes to transformation, which is being laid bare by the T20 Global League.

The player draft for this new tournament is being held in Cape Town tomorrow and, given how the coaching appointments have @KenBorland gone, there shall be little surprise if Black African cricketers play only a bit role in the tournament.

I asked CSA about transformation and quotas at the launch of their new extravaganza and the answer was that “they hope team owners will do the right thing”.

So quotas are important enough, or of such little effect, that we can have them imposed on South Africa’s Test team or in a World Cup semifinal, but not when overseas investors come to this country promising lots of money.

CSA should have insisted Geoff Toyana – a real beacon of Black African success at elite level – was a head coach of one of the franchises, as befits the leading local contender to be national coach.

They should have prescribed transformation numbers for the draft, as they do for all other cricket in this country.

It seems CSA quickly lose their morals when there is money involved. It will be very difficult to convince the anti-transformation lobby that it is the right thing to do when not playing Aaron Phangiso in a single World Cup game is allowed and overseas franchise owners can do what they like in the T20 Global League. CSA too often get the big transformation issues wrong and there will be a consequence for their lip-service, with the very communities they purport to uplift getting increasingly disenchanted.

And whether the T20 Global League will be the massive money-spinner CSA are hoping for is far from certain. There is still no real certainty over who owns some of the franchises and investor confidence is not particularly high, as shown by Brimstone’s withdrawal from the Stellenbosch franchise.

There is still no TV deal for the league, the broadcast rights already being shrouded in controversy.

I have no problem with the tournament having an international flavour, but just looking at all the franchise logos and names, there is a lack of a local identity. If the public don’t buy into this event as a South African tournament, then there is no way CSA are going to get the financial windfalls they are expecting.