Can’t understand rugby crisis

September 11, 2003 by neil manthorp

Plumbers fix leaks, fish­er­men catch fish and bankers charge too much. Elec­tri­cians install light­ing and crick­eters play crick­et, which is why they employ jour­nal­ists to help with columns.

Some­times ‘ghost writ­ing’ can be a lone­ly busi­ness. You real­ly can feel like a ghost because the man whose name appears above the words in the news­pa­per is a lit­tle too pre-occu­pied with oth­er things to find time, let alone qual­i­ty time, to gath­er his thoughts.

Often a news­pa­per edi­tor will request that a cer­tain sub­ject be addressed by his ‘star’ which can make the job of being the ‘ghost’ con­sid­er­ably easier.

On the recent tour of Eng­land it was my great plea­sure — and I mean that sin­cere­ly — to help Graeme Smith with a col­umn for an Eng­lish newspaper.

Things may change in the years ahead, but the cap­tain was thought­ful, hon­est and inter­est­ing about every sub­ject he touched upon.

On his last day in the coun­try he was required to write his final col­umn for the news­pa­per. The edi­tor asked whether he might make men­tion of the racism scan­dal afflict­ing the Spring­boks. I sug­gest­ed it was a ter­ri­ble idea, fear­ing the like­li­hood that what­ev­er he said might be mis­con­strued by some­one or other.

But Smith was not afraid. After all, it was up to me to make sure the words reflect­ed his views as clear­ly in print as they did when spo­ken. For the ben­e­fit of those not res­i­dent in the UK, or not reg­u­lar Dai­ly Tele­graph inter­net surfers, here is the rel­e­vant sec­tion repeat­ed. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting:

I’ve been asked a cou­ple of times to com­ment on the scan­dal that is cur­rent­ly over­shad­ow­ing the Spring­boks’ build-up to the rug­by World Cup. The details of the alleged racial inci­dent aren’t clear to me, so I can’t com­ment on what actu­al­ly hap­pened. But I’ll be hon­est, I’m not sure I would be able to comment.

The rea­son is sim­ple: I was­n’t even a teenag­er when Nel­son Man­dela was released from prison. I went to school and played sport in a mixed South Africa and took black and coloured friends home after­wards. I was too young to remem­ber apartheid South Africa and I don’t see colour now.

I hate to men­tion this because, to me, we were a bal­anced squad of crick­eters when we left South Africa, not a racial­ly bal­anced squad.

But peo­ple told me the squad had more black play­ers in it than any oth­er to leave our shores. I’m not dis­miss­ing that, because it’s impor­tant, but it’s for the politi­cians to get excit­ed about, not the crick­eters. Ask Makhaya or Her­schelle — we want to play cricket.

With such a mix of cul­tures and back­grounds with­in the squad, on the road for three months, I was aware it would be unnat­ur­al if we did­n’t have a cou­ple of guys get­ting on each oth­ers nerves and ‘snap­ping’. Well, we must be unnat­ur­al because, hand on heart, we grew clos­er togeth­er and learnt more about each oth­er as the weeks passed by. We became more and more like a fam­i­ly — albeit a slight­ly delin­quent one at times, notably on the team bus.

So I just could­n’t under­stand what had hap­pened in the rug­by camp. I was deeply shocked — we all were. But it’s so far away from what any of us have expe­ri­enced in crick­et. I guess none of us could real­ly under­stand it, though we would all con­demn the slight­est sug­ges­tion of racism in any walk of life.