It’s time for SA cricket to get real about itself

● The real world, a certain kind of sport-struck South African will tell you, should never be allowed into the game.

Not religion and certainly not politics. Basically, whatever you shouldn’t talk about in the pub you also shouldn’t allow to sully sport.

And that’s why some of us will need to tread carefully and cleverly if we are to hold some of the most pressing but less than obvious issues confronting cricket up to scrutiny.

We can stick our heads in the sand if we like and limit our thinking to who should coach SA’s team in the aftermath of the World Cup.

Or captain them.

Or lead the attack or take on the responsibilities of serving as the senior batter. Or any of the vacancies that look like they will need filling in the coming months.

Should we do so, without considering the bigger picture, we will look past the real problems.

A market correction, the Cambridge dictionary tells us, is “a reduction in prices in a financial market when they have been too high, bringing them back to a level closer to the actual values of companies and the real situation in the economy”.

Wikipedia says it’s “a rapid change in the nominal price of a commodity, after a barrier to free trade has been removed and the free market establishes a new equilibrium price. It may also refer to several of these single-commodity corrections en masse, as a collective effect over several markets concurrently.”

Essentially, it’s an inevitable re-ordering of what we think of as reality that does us the favour of bringing us back to what that reality actually is. That’s what

SA’s cricketers have punched above their weight at almost every Cricket World Cup

this World Cup has done for cricket in SA.

The most important aspect of the correction is not the realisation that SA are no longer among the game’s better teams, but understanding that they have punched above their weight at almost every Cricket World Cup.

The exception was 1999, when they had a fine team.

But that, as South Africans will know forever, means nothing when minds melt in the heat of a semifinal.

For the rest, barring 2003, when they should have done better than crash out in the first round, SA have excelled.

Which brings us to 2019: not reaching the semifinals is about right for this team. The disappointment, then, has to be about how they have played rather than the fact of their early exit.

And how they have played is a product of the system that has produced them.

“There’s been a lot of negative things about it said during this World Cup; I find it interesting,” Dwaine Pretorius said after Friday’s game against Sri Lanka in Chester-le-Street.

“Look at a player like Rassie [van der Dussen]. He’s played only first-class cricket and only franchise cricket until a year ago.

“And he’s set the world alight. I think that answers the question.

“He’s a good player and he’s going to be a very good player, but he learnt his trade there.

“He’s doing well here because of what he learnt there. It’s important that players spend time in that environment and know their games.

“He doesn’t look out of his depth at all because he knows his game.”

Van der Dussen has been a revelation since he made a low-key international debut in a T20 against Zimbabwe in East London in October last year.

But by then he had also “learnt his trade” playing in England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada and the Caribbean. The systems in all those countries can take credit for producing him.

It doesn’t help cricket in our country that it has to find ways to stay afloat, never mind compete internationally, in an economy that is barely breathing and in a society that is asking tough questions of who and what it is and isn’t.

What’s gone wrong for SA cricket? A lot.

And a lot more besides.