Biryanigate adds more spice to SA cricket’s racial stew

the decline of cricket in schools that aren’t among the handful from which South Africa’s best players have, once because of their race and affluence, always emerged: “We’re losing so many kids to basketball.”

Part of the answer to all this angst, you would think in this week of all weeks, is two short but powerful words: Lungi! Ngidi!

However, Ngidi is but one fine, young, black player. How many others who might also have been in South Africa’s test team are instead becoming associates in law firms? And as good as Ngidi is, as a Hilton College alumnus he is a product of an outdated delivery mechanism.

Cricket must tap the huge reservoir of talent beyond the walls of a few elite schools — which means more than plucking prospects from other places and sending them to those schools.

Both of those black administrators work at the game’s coalface, where things actually have to get done, often under the unfair gaze of embittered, obstructionist whites, and not in CSA’s weird bubble of unreality.

For instance, the reporter who wrote the Mumbai Mirror story was confronted by CSA — who were out of order to do so — and told he had misquoted his source.

All because Albert Morkel visited the suite of the Indian players’ partners during the second test in Centurion in search of biryani.

Biryani he was duly given, along with the ear of an observer from a country that has its own struggles with identity politics, but hasn’t a clue how South Africa functions.

The truth is Morne Morkel cannot be sure about his place in the team. No one can, but he has a right to wonder about his future in a set-up in which black players’ currency is valued highly — and which produces more black fast bowlers than any other type of black player.

The interview was not recorded. But the reporter maintains he identified himself to Albert Morkel and asked, and was given, permission to quote him.

The quotes, which the reporter stands by, are nothing South Africans wouldn’t have heard if they are the right colour — white — and around the right braai at the right time.

And here we are, in the throes of Biryanigate. Are we surprised?

Of course not.