CSA on a sticky wicket with Teeger’s demotion
The year 2024 has sparked into life with echoes of 1924. The political climate of the interwar period 100 years ago has many similarities with the current anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic environment.
Today marks the 101st day since the terror attack on Israel on October 7, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that the offensive to eliminate the Islamist movement Hamas will continue.
As it pursues urban warfare against Hamas the catastrophic humanitarian situation has horrified the world and fuelled mounting calls for a ceasefire.
Israel has dismissed the accusation as an exaggeration, saying its actions in Gaza have been committed in self-defence. It says the attacks, which Hamas officials vowed they will repeat, demonstrated that Israel’s existence as a state is threatened until Hamas is eliminated.
Pretoria’s decision to bring the genocide charge has certainly played out, as one could expect, along deeply entrenched political allegiances in SA. And one thing I’ve learnt about the Middle East is that there are never any winners when picking sides in such historically fraught and contested terrain. One gets the feeling, though, that business and the economy will be left to deal with the costs of the ANC’s historical support for Palestine.
But when this support openly metastasises into anti-Semitism of the type we witnessed with the sacking of SA U19 cricket captain David Teeger this past week, we are on a slippery slope for a free, democratic, constitution-loving society.
Sport and politics shouldn’t mix, but they all too often do. In 73 BCE a Roman gladiator led a revolt against the Roman republic. Spartacus rebelled because of the treatment of slaves. Mohammed Ali refused to serve in the military and his stance against what he saw as discrimination was iconic.
Teeger has travelled a familiar road towards cricket’s top table, matriculating from King Edward VII School, where he was the head boy. Teeger, an orthodox Jew, says the observance of his faith and recognition of his Jewish identity are central to who he is. I’ve always found mixing religion and sport curious (your god dislikes the other team so much that he wants them to lose? Really?).
When he unexpectedly won the Rising Star Award at the annual Jewish Achiever Awards in October 2023, from among 14 finalists, Teeger delivered a brief impromptu speech in which, after saying he hoped he could inspire other young religious sportsmen to follow their dreams, he concluded with a dedication of the award to the young soldiers of Israel. He can be accused of being a little naive, but the decision to pursue him through a disciplinary process established by the board of Cricket SA (CSA) in response to a complaint from the Palestine Solidarity Alliance seemed hard-handed at the time. Teeger was found not guilty in a legally comprehensive determination by Wim Trengove, who was appointed to determine whether the young talent had breached either the CSA or Central Gauteng Lions codes of conduct.
The decision to now strip him of the captaincy on trumped-up security concerns, when he will still be part of the team and exposed to the same supposed risks, smacks of blatant antiSemitism. As Trengove, one of SA’s finest silks, reminded us in his determination, the Constitutional Court has made the point that the right to freedom of expression does not protect hate speech. But he emphasised that the expression of unpopular or even offensive beliefs does not constitute hate speech.
“This seems to me to be an act of extreme cowardice. If Teeger was a professional player he would have remedies in contract or potentially administrative law, since this decision is manifestly irrational: the SA Palestinian organisation cited as the reason for the decision has already said it will protest if he is in the side. So there is no contribution to his safety, or that of the team, as a result of withdrawing his captaincy. The CSA has picked on a nonprofessional, who has no legal recourse. And in circumstances where (peaceful, lawful) protests could quite safely and easily be accommodated outside the ground.
“They know this kid can’t sue them, and will just do what others before him have done: go overseas. Cricket in SA is an abomination, and no young person of any talent should waste one moment of their time dealing with CSA. There is a reason South Africans hardly watch any more, and why many can’t even pick out members of the national side. The contrast with our rugby team, so focused on building unity and accommodating difference, could not be more vivid.”
But what else can we expect from an organisation that has a habit of playing all around the straight deliveries? A recent amaBhungane investigation found that despite raising more than R4.7m for breast cancer from the annual Pink Day, CSA has donated just R712,844 to the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital in five years.
While there is no proof of theft of money neither the CSA or the Central Gauteng Lions has been completely open regarding the Pink ODI Fund’s functioning.
It’s time for a few CSA board members to be culled.