Grounds for concern: transformation turmoil
Cricket in Gauteng exists in parallel universes
NONE of Gauteng’s black African, coloured or Indian schools offer cricket, less than 1% of the Gauteng Cricket Board’s (GCB) annual expenditure comes from state funding, and prominent black clubs want to withdraw from the province’s Premier League.
Consequently, officials say, the number of black players who stay in the province’s system long enough to reach franchise level and be considered for the national team is set to dwindle.
All of which makes sports minister Fikile Mbalula’s demand for 60% black representation in SA’s national teams “near impossible” to fulfil, the GCB says.
The latest twist in a saga that started on April 5 when Mbalula announced the quotas, which he said would be adopted with immediate effect, came on Wednesday night when the minister walked out of a television debate on the issue.
Mbalula was due to be on a panel on the Al Jazeera programme The Stream. The other guests were former SA captain Clive Rice, AfriForum chief executive Kallie Kriel, and political analyst Somadoda Fikeni.
The presenters voiced their “disappointment” that Mbalula had “declined” to take part. AfriForum said Mbalula’s “personnel had apparently failed to read the invitation ... which had quite clearly indicated the names of the participants”. The ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
But the administrators responsible for immediately finding more black players ready to play international cricket do not have such an easy way out.
“As much as government is demanding we reach the quota, they are not providing much funding,” GCB president Thabang Moroe said. “The 60% quota is near impossible to meet.
“If we are just going to pick black Africans to meet the quota, we are going to have a rent-aplayer situation and that will not be good.”
The GCB’s chief financial officer, Arno Fourie, said the organisation received R300 000 from the provincial authority and nothing from the national government. He estimated the GCB’s total budget at between R40-million and R45-million, and said development alone accounted for R12-million to R15million.
“We spend more than R1-million just on transporting players,” GCB chief executive Greg Fredericks, a former acting director-general of sport, said.
“I hear what the minister is saying, but on the ground there’s a huge disjuncture.
“It’s my job and I look forward to the challenge, but how are we going to get these players to the top?
“We don’t know where our next crop of black players will come from.”
Gordon Templeton, a GCB board member and a former chairperson of the Soweto Cricket Club (SCC), said: “It boggles the mind that the department [of sport] has chosen not to aggressively pursue sport in schools. When we were at school, we used to go and watch netball because the girls were playing. The girls would watch us play football because the boys were playing.
“Now, we are sitting with social problems like drug abuse at schools.”
Templeton described dealing with government officials as a “nightmare because the paradigm does not want to shift”.
“They can’t cut our grass
You go to Old Eds and you see the first world. Then you go to Lenasia and Dobsonville and you realise that things are not equal
twice a week, so a ball that is hit on the ground past cover can’t get to the boundary,” Templeton said. “They have a programme to cut the grass once a week because that works for football. But that’s not going to work for cricket.”
Templeton said cricket in the province existed in parallel universes: “You go to Old Eds and you see the first world. Then you go to Lenasia and Dobsonville and you realise that things are not equal.”
Fredericks said SCC and Dobsonville Cricket Club had to be persuaded not to pull out of the Premier League because of their consistently poor results. They have also considered amalgamation, which would only reduce cricket’s footprint in SA’s biggest township.
More positively, SCC have tabled a plan to take cricket into some of Soweto’s schools.
“A quota player has got there too easily,” Rice said on The Stream . “Everyone should have to fight very hard for his place in every team he has got into.”
But Rice’s race unfairly privileged him. If he had been born black — even in modern SA — his talent would likely have gone unnoticed.
sports@timesmedia.co.za