The single biggest reason our rugby and cricket teams are not darker
Telford Vice explains why so many black Africans fail to reach the top level
FOR 18 minutes this week, a roomful of sports-minded South Africans managed to not mention the war — that smouldering unhappiness about the racial imbalance in teams playing at the higher levels of games such as cricket and rugby.
Mostly, these teams are an awkward shade of pale — even when they purport to represent a nation that is more than 90% black.
The occasion was the unveiling of Hashim Amla as the captain of South Africa’s test cricket team. He is the first black player to be appointed to the position, though not the first to do the job. Ashwell Prince led South Africa in two tests in Sri Lanka in 2006 because Graeme Smith was injured.
Eighteen minutes is how long Amla’s press conference lasted. Not once in that time did anyone present raise the topic of race — not because it would have been impolite, but because Amla’s talent, skill and record would have made any such reference churlish. To these minds, he was a fine player first and a black man second.
Amla was accompanied behind the microphones by South Africa coach Russell Domingo, selection convener Andrew Hudson and Cricket South Africa chief executive Haroon Lorgat. Among the four, only Hudson is white.
Lorgat might not have noticed. “We’ve passed the time of looking at colour; we’re looking at ability,” he said afterwards. “We’ve got a crop of [black] players who meet the criteria to be in the national setup and it’s pleasing to be at a point where we don’t have to talk colour.”
And yet, in the most recent test South Africa played, against Australia at Newlands in Cape Town at the end of February, seven of the 11 were white. None was black African and none has been for three years, five months and 26 tests.
But as few as four whites — as many coloureds, two players of Asian descent and a black African — took the field in South Africa’s previous one-day international, against India in Centurion, Pretoria, on December 11.
When South Africa clashed with India in the World T20 semifinals in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 4, it fielded six whites, three coloureds and two players of Asian descent.
“We’ve done well in many respects, but we are not satisfied with regard to black African players,” said Lorgat. “We want to become aggressive in that space. At the centre of excellence and in our high-performance contracts, we are go-
We’ve passed the time of looking at colour; we’re looking at ability
ing to focus particularly on black African talent. If we want to sustain the game and grow the game and access the best talent in the country, we’ve got to get to the pool that matters.”
South Africa has been represented in test cricket since 1889 and in international rugby since 1891. Only five of the 317 test cricketers and 17 of the 751 test rugby players have been black Africans. The percentages are not pretty — 1.58% and 2.26% respectively.
Although much about sport can be explained in numbers, the disappearance from its ranks of talented black players when they reach senior levels cannot. This is the single biggest reason why South Africa’s teams are not darker.
We can blame racism-made law, first by colonialism and later by a regime repeatedly returned to power by a white electorate, for the first century or so of South Africa hardly ever fielding black players in what were called “national” teams.
Twenty years of democracy have given us all 22 of the black Africans who have played test cricket and rugby, but the problem remains unsolved. The effects of more than 350 years of oppression will take more than two decades to remedy at any significant level.
Young players trying to es- tablish themselves in professional sport have more opportunity to take their shot if they are from affluent families who are willing to indulge their dreams. Those of lesser means, talented or not, depend on being spotted by development programmes. If that does not happen, they get real jobs to pay the bills.
It does not help that conversations on transformation are interrupted by a defensive “Why are we always picking on rugby and cricket? Why don’t you go bother soccer?”
Neil Tovey, the white captain of the Bafana Bafana team that won the 1996 Africa Cup of
Nations, was having none of that. “It’s not right to do that — we’ve been playing multiracial leagues since 1978 [when the National Professional Soccer League launched the Castle League].”
Seventeen of the 18 players in the Bafana Bafana squad who played against New Zealand in Auckland on May 30 were black Africans. The odd man out was RonwenWilliams, who is coloured.
“We have a lot of white faces in our leagues and in amateur football,” said Tovey. “But can you name one South African soccer player who had a bursary in school? The Jeppes of the world don’t hand out soccer bursaries. When talented kids come out of primary school and they have the choice to play anything — rugby, cricket, soccer, table tennis — and they are offered rugby or cricket bursaries, their parents are going to take one of those and soccer falls by the wayside.
“Black and white kids play soccer together all the time; that’s not the problem. The problem is getting all these kids to progress through the structures and make sure they get proper coaching.”
When they do reach the top, footballers are derided by sections of a public who compare Bafana Bafana’s world ranking — now 65th — to the Proteas’ and the Springboks’. They are both second. Never mind that 207 teams play international soccer compared with rugby’s 102 and cricket’s 10.
Tovey listed himself as a good reason for South Africans of all races to stick with soccer. “I’ve made the most of being a white man in a black game. The number of black people who know me in this country far exceeds the total number of white people in this country.” That adds up to much more than 18 minutes of fame.