Bitter spat at root of cricket problem?
Lorgat’s and Patel’s relationship may have cost the sport dearly
● There was either $13-million (R175-million) or $17-million worth of difference between Cricket South Africa’s vision for their T20 league and SuperSport’s last year, but that might not be why the original attempt to tap into the game’s fastest-growing market foundered.
For that, we need to go back 10 years, when Haroon Lorgat and Imtiaz Patel were both in the running to replace Malcolm Speed as the International Cricket Council’s chief executive.
Patel ended up turning the job down and continuing his career as a SuperSport executive. Lorgat cracked the nod and was appointed in April 2008.
It only complicated the relationship between CSA and SuperSport when Lorgat was appointed chief executive of CSA in July 2013.
By then Patel had become MultiChoice South Africa’s group chief executive.
The bitterness between them has lingered all these years — and perhaps was a factor in SuperSport balking at how much money CSA wanted in rights fees for the tournament, which was postponed in October and is set to be played next season.
“Imtiaz said outright he wasn’t going to pay what CSA wanted as long as Haroon was around,” said a source close to the process.
The failure to secure a broadcaster and sponsors, and the consequent impending losses, duly prompted CSA to pull the plug on the competition in October — weeks before the first ball was to have been bowled.
Depending on whom you believe, Lorgat’s hasty departure from CSA in September was either punishment for what had gone wrong or carefully engineered by his adversaries.
CSA’s next step was to negotiate an equity partnership with SuperSport for a new tournament, which has angered the owners of the original franchises enough for three of the eight to threaten legal action.
And all because a couple of egos got in the way of making a deal.
“It’s a sexy angle but it’s not the truth,” said a source who knows both Lorgat and Patel.
He said Patel, now the chief executive for video entertainment at Naspers, which ultimately owns SuperSport, was no longer involved in rights negotiations for sport events.
But there was more to it than that.
“The reality is Imtiaz doesn’t like Haroon and he doesn’t respect him,” the source said. “But you often end up working with people you don’t like. And that’s not why rights negotiations for the T20GL failed — they simply couldn’t reach consensus on the numbers.”
What those numbers were is unconfirmed. A theory is that CSA wanted $15-million and that SuperSport offered $2-million; another that CSA asked for between $20million and $25-million and that SuperSport came back with $6-million to $8-million.
Again depending on whom you believe, that’s a degree of difference either of $13million or $17-million.
But SuperSport’s misgivings about the competition went beyond the financials.
“They had doubts about some of the owners,” a broadcasting insider said.
“They didn’t know whether they were fronting money-laundering operations or were involved in match-fixing.
“And they couldn’t understand why the franchise owners were foreign. If the money goes back into South African cricket it goes into the product, which would lead to better standards in the domestic game — which have been poor for years — and that would make SuperSport happy because it helps them sell subscriptions.”
He said SuperSport had indemnified themselves against legal action — “their stance is they were not part of that venture” — and that they were satisfied that the smaller-scale competition scheduled to be played next summer was a better fit for the South African cricket landscape.
“As long as the Proteas are available and you have good overseas players, not those at the end of their careers just playing for the pay cheque, you will have a good tournament.”