How the rand is driving our sports stars away
The weak rand is having an impact on SA rugby and cricket because local unions simply can’t compete, writes Luke Alfred
The kneejerk-reflex to crisis — in education, the state, even sport — is a media staple in SA, every bit as commonplace as a service delivery protest.
Not a week goes by when we aren’t enveloped in one crisis or another, or so the cliché goes. How is it, then, that we continue to trundle amiably along? Our tyres are flat, petrol is low and there’s a clown behind the wheel. It doesn’t quite stack up, now does it?
Though there is good reason to be suspicious of finding crises under every bush, sport in SA is fast approaching the point of no return. This is partly because of entrenched elites — at Sascoc, the PSL and in SA Rugby — but also because SA sport faces a slippery foe in the devaluation of our currency. Even middling professional rugby players can now move to Europe or Japan and earn good competitive salaries.
At one time, only players with pedigrees, guys like Bakkies Botha or Joe van Niekerk, could carve out cosy European sinecures. Now all you need is a Super Rugby season or two and a television profile. Sky Sports in Britain shows Super Rugby on a weekly basis and a quicksilver performance or two against the Hurricanes or the Brumbies isn’t going to harm your chances of playing professionally in the UK. Since he became coach at Montpellier, Jake White has been recruiting Saffers with abandon and some, like Wiaan Liebenberg and Schalk van der Merwe, are well short of being regular Boks. The commercial architecture of the elite game has changed and federations are seldom able to match in rands what can be earned in dollars or euros. Dale Steyn, for example, makes roughly the same amount of money playing in the Indian Premier League for six weeks as he does in the rest of the year put together. Cricket SA are understandably reluctant to prevent him from doing such lucrative freelance work, and privately are deeply perturbed that the burgeoning circuit of international T20 tournaments (the thrash in the Caribbean is taking place at the moment) will give rise to a culture of international privateers.
To some extent this has already happened in West Indian cricket, where such stars as Chris Gayle and Dwayne Bravo follow the T20 money, keeping their international commitments at arm’s length.
All of this is not an entirely bad thing from a local point of view, because there is no barrier to the Springboks or Bafana Bafana selectors picking overseas-based players. Players, at various stages of their careers, are going to follow the cycles of supply and demand. They do it locally, after all, so why shouldn’t they move beyond our national boundaries? Just this week, for instance, Roelof van der Merwe, the Titans all-rounder who has played a handful of ODIs and