No easy walk for task team
ONE of the most troublesome obstacles facing the four-person panel tasked with investigating the reasons for the Proteas’ continued failure at World Cups may be their own expectations.
ONE of the most troublesome obstacles facing the four-person panel tasked with investigating the reasons for the Proteas’ continued failure at World Cups may be their own expectations.
A great many interviews will have to be conducted to do the job thoroughly, a task that would take hundreds of hours even in an ideal world in which the interviewers were under no time constraints and their subjects were all willing and even keen participants.
But that will be difficult to achieve. SA’s professional cricketers at both domestic and international level have played their entire careers within an accidental, but systemic atmosphere of suspicion, mistrust and denial.
For all their paid lives, they have paid as much attention to what has not been said as what has been.
Many players have developed survival techniques to counter the whispers and doubts that surrounded them as they started; central to which is the pretty obvious habit of keeping your mouth firmly shut.
One of the many complexities that contributed to this unhealthy environment is also a deep irony because the principle is deeply and fundamentally good, the principle that transformation comes from the heart.
Many a coach and selector has asked over the years: “What are the numbers?”
And the exasperated response would be: “Real transformation comes from the heart, it is about transforming attitudes, not imposing quotas.”
So, nobody really knew who had been chosen in the squad and for what reason, which is a good thing in theory, but a bad one in practice.
By the time cricketers decide to make a career in the game, they are already the most insecure sportsmen on earth. Luck plays more of a role than in any other team sport and, statistically, they are destined to fail as individuals in somewhere between 80% and 90% of innings.
There were no experts on hand in the early days to help the players understand the transition into the new SA.
Whereas big corporates such as SA Breweries and Absa invested heavily in transformation, consultants to help manage the process and coach employees through the painful times, and to understand the reasons and appreciate the rewards, cricketers — by and large — were given the old-fashioned, parental: “Do it because I say so” instruction.
As a result, they don’t say a great deal about anything anymore, unless they are absolutely certain of the safety of their environment. They don’t talk openly about captains, coaches or managers — and most certainly, not about administrators.
“I leave that stuff to the bosses,” they say when a tricky question is asked.
“I stick to playing — it’s a game between bat and ball for me.”
That it is. But if South African cricket in general, and the Proteas, in particular, are to reach their collective potential, then I suspect some of these hard questions will need to be asked, and answered. Or all of them. The culture of silence is made worse when somebody does break ranks to make a comment or express an opinion, and is immediately shouted down amid a flurry of nastiness and abuse.
It happened to Jacques Kallis last week when he, clumsily, expressed his dismay and “embarrassment” at the sports minister’s decision to ban Cricket SA from bidding for international events (comprising four or more teams.)
Kallis believed such a move to be against every principle of transformation in that young sportsmen need funding and role models, both of which are provided by bringing the best in the game as close to their doorstep as possible.
The great all-rounder believes the minister and the game would both be better served by co-operation, not punitive sanctions.
He may spend much of his life out of the country at the Indian Premier League, the Caribbean Premier League and the Big Bash (all of which his teams won), but Kallis has a vested interest in transformation and, unlike the majority of us, he did something about it when he invested every cent from his R1m WP benefit year to establish his Foundation, 11 years ago.
By the end of this year, he will have paid for the high school education of more than 40 boys and given them a chance in life they would not otherwise have enjoyed.
A drop in the ocean, a grain of sand in the desert you may say, but not to those 40 boys.
The angry young men on Twitter and the columnists who implied that Kallis was a racist for his comments added plenty more invisible, but strong bricks to the wall of silence that surrounds the game.
Francois Pienaar may be the man to get through the wall. That’s probably why he’s on the panel.
Strong, confident, respected and, of course, with a World Cup in the bag.
But I suspect it is going to take something much, much more than a withering left shoulder from the former Springbok captain to get through.
I suspect it will take something quite the opposite, something subtle wrapped in layers of patience.
Those in the political “know” seem convinced that the minister’s shock announcement was a shot across Cricket SA’s bows and another roar of frustration and impatience at the pace of change.
He should be frustrated — he has every right and all the evidence to be frustrated, and he would have been on the lookout for those who rose to his provocation, such as Kallis.
It’s a shame, though, that the minister is playing the same game of smoke and mirrors that has confused so many young cricketers over the years.
It may be “tradition”, but we know for certain now that corporal punishment — or the threat of it — brings out the best in neither students nor sportsmen.
It simply makes them want to avoid mistakes and punishment rather than do their best and win the game.