Cricket SA has a chance to make a difference
Cricket has always served a purpose greater than itself. Historians have mused over whether cricket has provoked social, ethical and political change or mirrored it. Perhaps cricket is a lens through which social change can be assessed. You decide.
In 1962, England shed its archaic “gentlemen and players” social divide in English county cricket. This system, with separate changing rooms and other absurdities, was acutely embarrassing. That was the year the last bastion of this cricket aristocracy was removed — the Gentlemen vs Players annual fixture.
From 1955 to 1969, more than 24 British colonies gained their independence from the Crown. In 1960, Frank Worrell became the first black captain of the West Indian cricket team with tenure. He not only infused the traditional dull Test style of play with attractive, attacking cricket but also united eight countries in the West Indies into one nation. Coincidence?
The British foreign office felt the loosening of its powerful colonial grip as early as 1933 when it called in the English captain prior to the Ashes series in Australia. Neil Jardine was told the Australians needed to be put in their place as “they were getting ahead of themselves”.
Australia had apparently been manufacturing finished goods and not sending all its raw material to the UK. Jardine developed a strategy of bowling a barrage of bouncers. This became known as the bodyline series that became a diplomatic incident between the two countries. England won the Ashes, but lost their elevated position as the principled, ethical leader of the cricket world.
More recently, the “Sandpapergate” incident at Newlands sent Australia into a frenzy of indignation that included the prime minister castigating their players for going against Australia’s public moral code. Cricket Australia itself, not the International Cricket Council, suspended those involved from the game for a full year — it isn’t cricket played out to the full.
SA’s sporting isolation campaign in the 1970s and 1980s was led in the UK by Peter Hain and the English cricketer David Shepherd. This put additional pressure on the Nationalist government to end apartheid. When the game began to introduce multiracial cricket in the 1980s, Hassan Howa, founder of the SA Council on Sport, proclaimed rightly, that there should be “no normal sport in an abnormal society”.
Cricket became one of the lenses through which one viewed SA’s shifting social and political dynamics.
The Aurora Cricket Club in Pietermaritzburg in 1973 became the first integrated club team to play matches in SA. An Aurora Cricket Club deputation met the minister of sport Piet Koornhof. When they shared their concept with him, Koornhof said they should go ahead! Aghast, they asked whether he would give them official sanction. He replied: “Don’t be ridiculous, I am a politician.” That club’s activities brought social cohesion.
Cricket is seen as a moral compass and SA needs that direction finder right now.
The Cricket SA members’ council, like the SA government, have shown their inability or interest to govern for the common good. The council’s decision to either embrace or reject the Cricket SA interim board’s recommendations will immortalise them one way or the other. They will either be remembered for changing the course of SA cricket for a brighter and secure future (the high road in Clem Sunter speak) or their names will be mentioned in dark alleys in hushed whispers.
Cricket SA can lead the way and show our government that radical change for the common good is indeed possible.
The council members must shed their title of ultimate authority of the SA game and hand over control to a competent, slimmer, more effective Cricket SA board, with a majority of independent skilled directors. That will be one of the key recommendations of the Cricket SA interim board. The human resources dispute backlog will be cleared by then and Cricket SA can be refreshed in structure, leadership and personnel.
If they choose not to approve this and other recommendations, the members’ council would then cast cricket adrift, rudderless, into the future, as they have done previously. SA cricket could then morph into a largely domestic amateur sport reminiscent of the period of sporting isolation.
SA cricket, and indeed SA, need to re-emerge on the world stage. Both have lost their global significance owing to their selfserving leadership combined with incompetence, faction fighting and nepotism.
The members’ council have one choice. For them to find their greater purpose they need to embrace the inevitable change. Simply, now is the time.
Van der Bijl played first-class cricket for Natal, Transvaal and Middlesex. He was chosen to represent SA for the cancelled tour of Australia in 1971 and was ICC match officials global manager from 2008 to 2015.