Did Kagiso Rabada take a wrong turn in his sport?
● Maybe Kagiso Rabada should have heeded the signs and not veered off his original path.
Rabada was born on May 25 1995 — the same day Francois Pienaar’s team started their journey to Rugby World Cup glory by beating the Wallabies at Newlands. He arrived at St Stithians as a hotshot fullback.
Had he not kicked rugby into touch for a future in fast bowling, might he have been welcomed back to Cape Town on Monday among Siya Kolisi’s heroes to help thousands of their compatriots celebrate the Springboks winning the William Webb Ellis Cup for the third time?
Rabada has been the top-ranked bowler in the world in two of the three formats, and is currently in the top five in both. He is also one of the 66 unfortunates who have tried and failed to claim a single men’s Cricket World Cup for SA. Clearly, rugby is getting a lot right. Just as clearly, cricket is doing something wrong. But what?
“There’s too much emphasis on racialism, on certain groups needing to be there,” Cassiem Jabbar said as the crowd awaiting the Boks grew at Cape Town’s City Hall.
“I believe this Springbok team was there on merit. I don’t think there’s any other wings that we could have chosen for SA, or any other front-row forwards.
“We’re past the stage where we talk about quota players and players of colour. Some people are still stuck in that conversation.”
Cricket people included, and specifically the prevailing philosophy that some black people are blacker than others and thus more deserving of opportunities.
It was radical from someone who might have been recognised as the best scrumhalf in the world had he not been guilty of playing rugby while black during apartheid.
Surely there is more to SA’s perennial failure to launch at Cricket World Cups than an obsession — mostly healthy and necessary, sometimes damaging and dangerous — with colour coding?
“It’s not about plucking talent and putting it into [elite] schools,” Brendan Fogarty said. “We need to invest in communities to ensure that that talent grows in those communities.
“Cricket was ahead of rugby, when you look at programmes like Baker’s Mini-Cricket. Has cricket taken its eye off the ball? I don’t know. But you need 1,000 children playing rugby to create one international.
“So if you’re taking a talented player out of a community, that community might not play anymore. We need to have communities, in their thousands, playing cricket. It’s a numbers game.”
That, too, is radical. Fogarty is an isiXhosa teacher at Bishops Preparatory School — about as elite as schools get. But he also runs the Vusa rugby development programme, which counts Springbok and Stormers flank Sikhumbuzo Notshe as an alumnus.
A much highlighted feature of the Boks’ success is that their players come from more than the familiar crop of schools.
Maybe what cricket needs is what rugby has embraced: radicalism.