To save the sport, Cricket SA must rid itself of parasites

The Cricket South Africa board has brought in the services of a PR company to help polish its tarnished image, which is so bad at the moment that not even all the distractions of a witch-hunt have been able to disguise the executive’s complicity in the ugly shambles that the game in this country has become.

Of course, CSA has also engaged the services of a quarrel of lawyers to help the board handle the numerous legal issues it is dealing with, the most recent of which was their failure to appear before parliament’s sports portfolio committee as scheduled on Friday.

The forensic report into the activities of suspended CEO Thabang Moroe and whether the board itself is implicated in any misgovernance was bound to have been a hot topic in parliament on Friday, but CSA cried off and begged for a postponement because the federation said the report was not yet ready to be made public.

My legal friends tell me this is probably above board because if serious allegations are made by the report, it would need to be sent by CSA’s audit and risk committee to lawyers in order to ensure due process is followed. But given that the report was finalised at the end of June, progress in this crucial matter has been glacial.

More important than any PR company or even lawyers, however, is that CSA has to take notice of what its players are saying.

Their services are the very lifeblood of the game. Without our top cricketers, the Proteas slide down the rankings, sponsors, crowds, viewers and broadcasters disappear, and the money dries up.

And while that would surely chase away the self-serving vultures feeding on the game, it would also create a vicious circle because with less money, teams become less competitive and the cycle continues to spiral down into oblivion.

The current players, apart from showing their support for the heroic Lungi Ngidi and his stance on Black Lives Matter, have been largely quiet in terms of weighing in on all the issues that have been tearing cricket apart during the national lockdown.

The players’ union, the South African Cricketers’ Association, has quite rightly been taking up the cudgel and speaking on their behalf.

But the first few murmurings are starting to emerge of how desperately uncertain and unhappy the players are.

There have been numerous reasons for top cricketers to leave this country for greener pastures over the last few years, but the possibility of the entire professional game collapsing could see the floodgates really open.

While hearing those former players who are speaking out about previous discrimination and the pain it has caused is important and valuable, we have heard way too much from people who have either disgraced the game or who have based their accusations on factual inaccuracies.

These charlatans have been pushed to the front of the choir to further the ‘cricket capture’ agenda which has been in place ever since Moroe and his allies on the board and in CSA management set it in motion.

Moroe’s temporary replacement, Jacques Faul, has now given up his efforts to clean up the game, forced out by a board which actively worked against him.

Director of cricket Graeme Smith is clearly now the main target because there have been way too many spurious allegations made about his time as captain.

Lest we forget, under his watch the Proteas became the best team in the world in all formats and were at their happiest in terms of unity and embracing diversity.

Saca is now coming under fire too and this fits in perfectly with Moroe’s agenda. The suspended CEO stated clearly his intention to destroy the power and influence the players’ union had in the game, and he was trying to achieve this by causing racial divisions, having attempted to engineer a split with black African players leaving Saca.

Fortunately SACA has had a strong president and servant of the game in Omphile Ramela, and there is still hope for South African cricket.

We still have incredible playing talent and there is so much love for the game in this country.

South African sport has also produced many tremendous administrators, so they are out there.

But it is getting late. Short of doing what one provincial president recommended – “the CSA Board is now in such a bad place that in our culture we say you have to slaughter a goat to cleanse it” – one can only hope the CSA members’ council do the right thing at the AGM on September 5 and vote in people who are committed to saving the game, not parasitizing it.

Ken Borland.

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