We’re all to blame for SA slipping into comfort zone

● Did you feel the earth move?

Maybe not, but years from now, or maybe just months, someone will flip the calendar back to February 23, 2019 as the moment the planets were aligned with their new reality.

Nothing registered on the Richter scale, no buildings toppled and there was no tsunami.

But nothing in SA cricket should be allowed to be what it believed itself to be — and was believed to be — before

Oshada Fernando nudged Keshav

Maharaj to midwicket and took a single at around lunchtime at St George’s Park last Saturday.

Sri Lanka had come to SA without the best players of a generation who were a pale imitation of the generation who had come before, with internal politics ripping at the foundations of their structures, and with the fixing police closing in on some of their biggest names.

They came to take on a SA team who were superior in every sense and every department, a side fresh from hammering Pakistan — a better team than the Sri Lankans — 3-0.

And Sri Lanka won.

Weirder yet, they won 2-0. How the bloody hell?

I know you know all that already. But the truth of it cannot be allowed to slip away into the cloud of Kolpak signings, World Cup preparations and whatever else has hit cricket’s headlines in the past few days.

If it does, then the warning will go unheard and therefore unheeded. So the worst thing SA could do is storm back in the one-day series that starts at the Wanderers today. Should they win too many of the five games too easily, the shock all cricket-minded South Africans

Why should players take any of us — suits, public or media — seriously?

would have felt last weekend is likely to be dulled and consigned to the category of subjects we don’t talk about to strangers in the pub. Politics. Religion. That time Sri Lanka came to SA and won the Test series.

Dale Benkenstein, SA’s batting consultant, is copping a fair amount of flak. And so he should: the buck of What Went Wrong stops with him. But only in a narrow-minded sense.

The bigger truth is that SA have been allowed to settle into their comfort zone by distracted administrators, a blindly adoring public and an uncritical media. It’s all of our faults.

When last have the more expensive suits — not those who put in long hours at lower levels — lurched into the light to say something significant that isn’t geared towards making the Mzansi Super League seem bigger and better than it is, or to skew attention to the World Cup?

But top administrators are interested in petty power and making money and not a lot else. The players know that as well as any of us, which is why officials are held in dubious regard everywhere except in each other’s company.

The level of crowd behaviour at St George’s Park and Newlands during last season’s series against Australia stooped so low it shamed the very notion of being South African.

To support your team is one thing, to denigrate the opposition’s partners in that cause tells us how base and uncivilised we are.

And then there’s us, the press. Actually, first there’s television — who daren’t say too much that isn’t positive lest their rights deals aren’t renewed. As for us, pecking away at our keyboards in ever more tortured attempts to make sense of it all, how do we hope to do so when we are more intent on tweeting and gramming and memeing ourselves to what we consider to be relevance?

Why should the players take any of us seriously? Neither the suits, the public nor the media have shown themselves to be worthy of holding up a mirror to a team who need to take a hard, honest look at themselves before it’s too late.

South Africans deserve better than what they saw from their team during the Sri Lankan series.

And the team deserves better from South Africans.