Brace yourselves

November 6, 2002 by neil manthorp

Neil Man­thorp — 06/11/2002

Rug­by’s cur­rent bout of infight­ing con­cern­ing the reshap­ing of the Cur­rie Cup may not seem rel­e­vant to crick­et sup­port­ers but the more astute among you will watch, lis­ten and learn because crick­et is head­ing for even more sen­si­tive and poten­tial­ly divi­sive times.

Both sports want their pre­mier domes­tic com­pe­ti­tions to return to a strength vs strength for­mat. In fact, both sports have been told by strate­gic busi­ness con­sul­tants that they must do that in order to sur­vive finan­cial­ly and com­pete internationally.

Rug­by’s affil­i­ates decid­ed to return to a six team Cur­rie Cup but now that the real­i­ty is upon the eight less­er teams they appear to have changed their minds and are fight­ing for what they call their ‘sur­vival’. They don’t know how lucky they are.

Crick­et will take a far more rad­i­cal deci­sion in the com­ing weeks and it will involve four provinces los­ing their first class sta­tus and much of their identity.

If the pro­pos­al from the new­ly formed SA Crick­et PTY ltd is rat­i­fied by the exec­u­tive com­mit­tee, as seems cer­tain, then next year’s Super­Sport Series will be con­test­ed by just sev­en teams with four becom­ing essen­tial­ly ama­teur unions feed­ing their big­ger cousins.

No won­der every­one out­side Benoni is feel­ing awk­ward and embar­rassed about East­erns becom­ing Super­Sport Series cham­pi­ons this year. Still, at least North­erns will be a hell of a team next sea­son! Shame about the prospects of Gaut­eng and North West. It’s going to be an extreme­ly emo­tion­al time when hot-head­ed­ness will be easy but painful­ly destructive.

One fun­da­men­tal truth must be remem­bered. South African crick­et can­not sus­tain 11 provin­cial teams and 215 con­tract­ed play­ers. Hard deci­sions had to be tak­en, but it will take strong lead­ers to steer the South African game through the next two or three years. Brace yourselves.