Amateur stream will ensure SA doesn’t lose a future Clive Rice

The late Clive Rice and I began our varsity cricket careers playing in the Pietermaritzburg campus second team of Natal University. We struggled initially to find our feet in the more adult game.

When Clive was picked for the Natal University intervarsity team he batted at No 9 and bowled sixth change! Strange but true. Later in Johannesburg, he forged ahead to become an extraordinary internationally acclaimed all-rounder.

Similarly, when I was picked for the intervarsity team, it was as a potential replacement for our opening bowler who was carrying an injury.

My first match for the second team was against Standard CC at the Postage Stamp field alongside the Msunduzi River. Our team was cruising to victory when professor Rayner, an elderly gentleman with a hearing aid, came to the wicket at No 8. He was greeted by a barrage of bodyline bowling by Gordon Lennox-Brown, who at the time was a fourth-year agricultural student. Two bouncers hit this poor man on the chest. As a new boy, I hesitantly suggested that the brutal assault was enough.

Gordon retorted, “Don’t be ridiculous! He failed me in second year!”

It was a match that could have been included in the chapter, “The Village Cricket Match”, in AG Macdonell’s book, England, Their England. That chapter rates as the most humorous of cricket writing.

Cricket was just one part of a life of experimenting and learning at university. Varsity cricket was run by the students with average club type facilities, no coach, no gym and no medical back up. It was, however, the best learning environment one could imagine.

We underwent a cricket voyage of self-discovery, coached each other and as a group happened upon a team culture that we felt was unique.

While one cannot recreate the past, we need to establish a much stronger amateur stream throughout SA, which is not an easy task. If not, players like Clive Rice will be lost.

The great allrounder Imran Kahn, too, started his Cambridge career as a batsman, bowling only medium pace. Fast bowlers tend to develop late as their bodies fully develop in their late teens and early twenties.

By creating premier leagues that genuinely challenge club and varsity players, late developers will not be lost to SA cricket.

All players who choose the amateur stream need the option to work and or study while pursuing their Protea dream.

SA cricket can ill afford anyone falling through the cracks, especially as only 1,875 of our 25,000 schools play four sporting codes.

Both channels, amateur and professional, are critical to the sustainable success of our national cricket teams.

The amateur stream requires strong re-engineered premier leagues, including clubs and universities, to relentlessly test aspirant Protea cricketers and keep our amateur foundation strong.

The alternate professional model is that of young cricketers at school being talent identified and selected for the provincial and franchise academies. This model also ensures that those identified from underprivileged communities are granted scholarships in model C or private schools, as was the case with Makhaya Ntini.

Each of the 18 Protea debutants in 2019/2020 came from established and model C schools. Not one came through a private or township school. Mfuneko Ngam remains the single Protea player to have completed his education in a township — Motherwell in Port Elizabeth.

Two of the 2019-20 debutants are examples of these two channels.

Zubayr Hamza went to Rondebosch Boys High School and then, as an amateur, studied full-time in the Sports Skills for Life Skills programme at University of the Western Cape, before gaining his professional contract. He now studies parttime. Kyle Verreynne has come through the Jacques Kallis Foundation from Wynberg Boys High School, and immediately progressed into the academy system to a professional contract.

The Cricket SA financial difficulties will require considerable cost cutting. Cricket SA cannot rely on the national government for help as its focus needs to be the provision of basic amenities to the underprivileged, a better education system and the resuscitation of the economy.

The national cricket family will have to absorb the pain of the inevitable reduction of professional cricketers, less hubs and academies and therefore fewer paid cricket positions. Like the whole of SA, we will need to muscle through this devastating period and come out a better, leaner and stronger sporting nation.

A strong amateur channel will allow aspirant Proteas the choice of a more balanced portfolio of work and/or study while furthering their chance of Protea selection. Not one cricketer will then be lost to SA cricket.