Ken Borland

Keegan Petersen revealed himself as one of South Africa’s brightest batting talents in the series against India, but the man who made the No.3 position his own has now suffered the disappointment of being ruled out of the tour to New Zealand due to a positive Covid test. This does, however, potentially open the way for an exciting young batsman like Ryan Rickelton to make his long-awaited debut.

Petersen, who is asymptomatic, has been replaced in the squad by Western Province talent Zubayr Hamza.

But Petersen’s misfortune, announced on the morning of the team’s departure for New Zealand, could well be just the break the 25-year-old Rickelton has been waiting for. The Central Gauteng Lions batsman has been part of the Proteas squad since the tour to Pakistan a year ago, but is yet to catch a game.

Rickelton has been in exceptional form in the domestic four-day competition this season, and scores of 90 and a match-saving 102 not out for the Lions against Western Province at Newlands last weekend took his tally this summer to 473 runs in five innings, at an average of 118.25, with three centuries.

But as much as one would like to see a new talent on the international stage, you have to wonder if the Proteas selectors won’t use Petersen’s absence as a lifeline for Aiden Markram.

Markram has scored just 140 runs in his last nine innings, with one half-century, and there was a strong possibility he was going to lose his opening spot in New Zealand to the uncapped Sarel Erwee, who is averaging 86 in four-day cricket this season.

But both Markram and Erwee could conceivably fill Petersen’s No.3 spot. Rickelton is also a top-order batsman, comfortable in the top three, but choosing two uncapped batsmen in Erwee and Rickelton could be too much of a risk for the selectors, so it will be interesting to see which option they choose.

Travel from South Africa may be blacklisted now by many Western nations due to the discovery of a new Covid variant, but the Netherlands cricket team made it clear on Saturday that their decision to postpone their series against the Proteas had nothing to do with safety concerns but was all about the uncertainty created by the travel bans that have been instituted.

Cricket South Africa and the Koninklijke Nederlandse Cricket Bond released a statement on Saturday afternoon saying they had agreed to ‘defer’ the remainder of the ODI series. That means the matches at Centurion on Sunday and the Wanderers on Wednesday will no longer take place. The first ODI at SuperSport Park was washed out two overs into the Netherlands’ pursuit of the Proteas’ target of 278.

“We have been taken care of by Cricket South Africa in a magnificent way, they have done everything to make us feel safe,” Netherlands manager Steven van Dijk told The Citizen on Saturday.

“So it’s not that we feel unsafe at all, the bubble has been executed perfectly. The only insecurity we have felt is not being able to fly home.

“So we have not been able to end the series because there is so much uncertainty. Some guys need to fly to New Zealand, others to England, which is a problem, the Netherlands too, people had to sit for hours at the airport.

“The players are getting phone calls from home, worried messages, some of them have young kids at home or pregnant partners. So we are looking at all the options for flights – two people getting tickets here, another three there,” Van Dijk said.

Worries about how welcome the players will be upon their return to Europe are also weighing on the minds of the squad. Van Dijk said there was also no clarity over what will await the team on the other end of their flight.

“The conditions of entry change by the hour. The people on Friday’s flight to Schiphol had to wait seven hours to be tested and if they were negative they were allowed to leave the airport and go home for a 10-day quarantine.

“If they were positive then they had to quarantine in a hotel. Of the 600 people on that plane, 61 tested positive. But at the moment we are all just guessing what will happen when we land.

“We were booked to fly on December 2 but we are not sure if we can leave earlier. That’s probably the worst-case scenario and the guys who urgently need to get home, like those with pregnant partners, we are trying to get home sooner,” Van Dijk said.

Last summer it was England and Australia controversially pulling out of tours to South Africa due to their Covid fears and now the current international season could be ripped apart as well as the Netherlands tour and the vital Indian visit are hanging in the balance following reports that local scientists had detected a new variant of the virus in Gauteng and neighbouring countries.

The UK government started the panic when they put South Africa on the travel red list overnight, with the European Union expected to follow suit soon. This is despite scientists assuring that the new variant almost certainly does not come from South Africa, they have just been the first to identify it.

More than half-a-dozen of the Netherlands players are based in the UK, meaning they will have problems returning home after their three-match ODI series against the Proteas ends on Wednesday.

CSA issued a statement on Friday afternoon, while the Netherlands innings in the first ODI had been interrupted by rain at Centurion, saying it was highly unlikely that the tourists will be able to leave before the end of the weekend.

Given that they would have to quarantine for 10 days in a hotel if they do not return home as soon as possible, it is understandable that the Dutch team wanted to head off on Friday. But they will now probably only be able to leave on December 2, due to the lack of flights available in the hysteria. It is believed their federation is willing to cover the costs of quarantine.

That means the third ODI, scheduled for December 1, could still go ahead and the series can be completed, unless some other flight option is discovered by the KNCB.

While CSA and the Proteas will be disappointed to not complete the series, they – and especially their meagre coffers – would be devastated if the India tour set to start on December 17 does not go ahead.

India are set to fly to South Africa on December 8, but reports from India suggest the BCCI is waiting for their government to make a decision regarding travel to South Africa.

India A are currently in Bloemfontein playing the first of a three-match series of four-day games and CSA sources have told Saturday Citizen they have expressed no concern about staying in the country.

At the Joburg Open golf tournament at Randpark, co-sanctioned with the DP World Tour (formerly known as the European Tour), thunderstorms caused delays on Friday, but 20 European-based golfers, out of the field of 156, withdrew before the second round began, trying to scramble their way home before the travel deadline.

Ill-equipped leadership is something which really hits a nerve when it comes to South African cricket, largely due to the incompetent and self-serving Board and CEO which the game here had to labour under between 2017 and 2019.

So it was distressing this week to see the new CSA Board suffer their first mis-step, showing the same sort of reactionary leadership of their predecessors rather than the proactive management that is required of a billion rand organisation.

The Proteas have been grappling amongst themselves with issues of a new team culture for these changing times, especially since Black Lives Matter has made such a dramatic impression on the global sports environment. And the anti-racism message of that movement should hit particularly near to home due to the notorious history of our country.

Unfortunately, the team have not been able to come up with a unified response to BLM. It has not been a good look to see some of the team kneeling, others standing; some with fists raised, some with hands by their side.

But the CSA Board has failed to provide strong leadership in this regard. It’s not as if this issue has suddenly sprung upon them. How to properly acknowledge BLM has been a problem for the Proteas for more than a year. A proactive board would have known the spotlight would be on the team at a World Cup and would have ensured proper engagement was held with the squad and a solution found before the tournament. The sort of engagement that happened on Wednesday night once the crisis was already in full swing.

Instead, like a poor captain moving his field around in response to a boundary being hit, CSA chose the ham-fisted route of not consulting and issuing a directive, on the morning of a crucial game.

The national team have had their fill of arrogant administrators having the audacity to run cricket as their own fiefdoms, and the timing of the edict, and the fact that it came out of the blue without any consultation, was bound to cause some push-back.

Quinton de Kock’s initial refusal to take a knee, even though he is a product of a mixed-race family, caused near hysteria in this race-obsessed country of ours. Personally, I believe it is the right thing to take a knee for Black Lives Matter, but what worried me more about De Kock’s actions was that he was willing to leave his team in the lurch, pulling out of a crunch game two hours before the start, because he was very annoyed at being forced to make a gesture.

But many of his critics should perhaps take the beam out of their own eye before they try to remove the speck in De Kock’s eye. How many of them are anti-vaxxers? Because that is a similar issue of personal freedoms versus common good.

How many of those who viciously labelled the 28-year-old as a racist would be willing to make a gesture when it comes to protesting Farm Murders?

Because in many people’s eyes, rightly or wrongly, Black Lives Matter is as politicised an issue as Farm Murders. Just as there surely can be no moral objection to Black lives mattering, surely all farm murders are wrong?

This is where education is so important. CSA should have sat down with the players a long time ago and explained exactly what Black Lives Matter means in a South African context and what exactly the team would be supporting and protesting against should have been thrashed out and finalised.