SA players and English clubs

December 29, 2000 by neil manthorp

Neil Man­thorp — 29/12/2000

Good news and bad news for a cou­ple of South African crick­eters in the last cou­ple of days — finan­cial­ly, at least.

Nicky Boje’s con­tin­ued run of impres­sive form in nation­al colours has per­suad­ed Eng­lish coun­ty Leices­ter­shire that the Free State all rounder will sim­ply not be avail­able for enough of the Eng­lish sea­son to make his appoint­ment worth­while and have now turned their atten­tion towards “an Aus­tralian spin­ning all rounder,” to quote coach Jack Birken­shaw. Their man, it tran­spires, is for­mer Aussie ‘keep­er Rod­ney Marsh’s son, Daniel, who also bowls left arm­ers and bats more than useful

The deci­sion is a mas­sive dis­ap­point­ment for Boje whose finan­cial secu­ri­ty — let alone crick­et­ing knowl­edge — could have been huge­ly boost­ed by a sea­son in Eng­land. To make mat­ters worse, Leices­ter­shire’s deci­sion was lit­er­al­ly based on a mat­ter of ten days.

Han­sie Cron­je’s for­mer coun­ty (he played for them in 1995) decid­ed that Boje would give them a sig­nif­i­cant chance of suc­cess in the B&H one-day com­pe­ti­tion which kicks off the Eng­lish sea­son. But they need­ed him for atleast three of the five pre­lim­i­nary match­es. He would only have been avail­able for the last one. The extend­ed West Indies tour itin­er­ary thus cost Boje in the region of R600,000.

Bet­ter news for anoth­er SA crick­eter, though, and note that he is described as an “SA crick­eter” rather than a “South African crick­eter”. Vas­bert Drakes has been signed on a one-year con­tract by that most South African of coun­ties, Warwickshire.

Nation­al cap­tain Shaun Pol­lock is believed to have put his foot down when told by the UCB that he could not return to his (and Allan Don­ald’s) for­mer coun­ty when they offered him a con­tract just six weeks ago. But Pol­lock­’s hec­tic sched­ule per­suad­ed War­wick­shire coach Bob Woolmer to con­vince Pol­lock that he would be bet­ter off return­ing in 2002 (when SA have an entire win­ter off) rather than squeez­ing too much in between April and Sep­tem­ber this year.

Amaz­ing­ly, even nation­al phys­io­ther­a­pist Craig Smith came close to land­ing a lucra­tive job in Eng­land (also with War­wick­shire, inci­den­tal­ly) and the shop­ping list is far from completed.

Nantie Hay­ward, Mfu­neko Ngam, David Ter­brugge, Gary Kirsten, Jacques Kallis, Lance Klusen­er and Makhaya Nti­ni have all been approached and have either declined or are still con­sid­er­ing their offers. When the real­i­ty of half a mil­lion rand in the bank hits home, it’s not surprising.