October 2007 — Strong Majola averts SA/Zim Crisis (COLUMN)

November 28, 2017 by neil manthorp

I’ve been an unapolo­getic sup­port­er of Zim­bab­we Crick­et and its play­ers since cov­er­ing their inau­gur­al Test match just over a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry ago. There were some great times in the ear­ly days but it has been an almost end­less strug­gle for over a decade now. The Unit­ed Crick­et Board of SA and then Crick­et South Africa have both made spo­radic attempts play the role of big broth­er and help up north, but most­ly not enough has been done. A decade ago, how­ev­er, one of those spo­radic attempts to assist the inter­na­tion­al min­nows almost went spec­tac­u­lar­ly wrong…Cricket South Africa chief exec­u­tive Ger­ald Majo­la avert­ed a cri­sis in South African crick­et on Thurs­day, a cri­sis with the poten­tial to have brought the domes­tic game to a crush­ing halt.

Zim­bab­we’s pro­posed semi-par­tic­i­pa­tion in the 2007-08 Super­sport Series would have dimin­ished the coun­try’s pre­mier first-class com­pe­ti­tion to such an extent that the coun­try’s play­ers were pre­pared to place their jobs on the line in order to pre­serve its integrity.

The Super­sport Series fix­tures were finalised in May and the Fran­chis­es start­ed mak­ing their plans. Yet Zim­bab­we could be squeezed into the com­pe­ti­tion for a sin­gle round of match­es almost a month into the new sea­son as a jok­er in the pack.

Bizarrely, the pro­pos­al to award Fran­chise teams points for these match­es against Zim­bab­we was seen as a way of giv­ing them ‘mean­ing’ and pur­pose. Instead, it would have had the oppo­site effect. While some Fran­chis­es would have played a full-strength Zim­bab­we, oth­ers would have faced what­ev­er rag-tag XI remained in the coun­try while the Zim­bab­wean nation­al team ful­filled its inter­na­tion­al com­mit­ments dur­ing the summer.

Last year the Titans played mag­nif­i­cent crick­et and ran away with the title but usu­al­ly there are two, three or even four hors­es in the race at the busi­ness end of the sea­son. How much respec­t would for the game would remain if the cham­pi­ons were crowned on the back of a full house of points in a game which fin­ished in two days in Harare?

Worse — what hap­pens if a Fran­chise sweep­s all before them but fails to win the title because it rained for three days while they were in Bulawayo.

And if those sce­nar­ios are bad, think about this one. Fran­chise team trav­els to Harare bad­ly in need of points. Rain wipes out the first day. Senior Zim­bab­we play­er hap­pens to men­tion to Fran­chise cap­tain how hard life is in his coun­try at the moment…and how much food R1000 could buy. And how bad­ly out of form he and a few oth­er of his play­ers are. Or could be, if nec­es­sary… after­all, they don’t have any points to play for.

If any of those poten­tial sit­u­a­tions made you cringe, imag­ine how angry the senior play­ers and admin­is­tra­tors from the six Fran­chis­es were when they were told, with a week’s notice and with­out any con­sul­ta­tion, that Zim­bab­we were being shoe-horned into the com­pe­ti­tion. They were furious.

Each Fran­chise has a Play­ers’ Rep­re­sen­ta­tive who reports to the South African Crick­eters Asso­ci­a­tion (SACA) and speaks on behalf of the pro­fes­sion­al play­ers in his region. At the begin­ning of this week they all decid­ed to fly to Cape Town for an emer­gency meet­ing at which they dis­cussed their con­cerns and, hours lat­er, informed their chief exec­u­tive, Tony Irish, that they would refuse to play any Zim­bab­wean fix­ture in the cur­rent circumstances.

Some offi­cials with­in South African crick­et were aghast at the temer­i­ty of the play­ers and vowed to fight them ‘to the death’ if nec­es­sary which, in real life, would have meant sack­ing the play­ers for breach of con­tract and employ­ing more and more until they had enough to send a team to Zimbabwe.

The clash of pig-head­ed egos, igno­rance, arro­gance and self-serv­ing agen­das would have resem­bled the sport­ing admin­is­tra­tive equiv­a­lent of the World Trade Centre.

But that’s where Majo­la stepped in. On Thurs­day he, too, flew to Cape Town for an emer­gency meet­ing with Irish at which he acknowl­edged that CSA’s best inten­tions, to help Zim­bab­wean crick­et, had not been ade­quate­ly dis­cussed and planned with the players. Instead of impos­ing its col­lec­tive will on the play­ers, Majo­la said he would pre­fer to work with SACA to find a solu­tion which would sat­is­fy all three par­ties — CSA, Zim­bab­we Crick­et and the SA Play­ers. Irish indi­cat­ed clear­ly that South Africa’s play­ers were hap­py to assist their Zim­bab­wean coun­ter­parts but in a way which did not adverse­ly affect their own competition.
That process has now started.

In the mean­time, it’s prob­a­bly a very good thing for all con­cerned that only two or three men real­ly know just how close SA Crick­et came to hav­ing its own 9/11.