Ken Borland

The second week of the Social Justice and Nation-Building Hearings has taken place at Cricket South Africa’s Melrose offices and, with former players giving evidence this week, it is clear that many feelings of discrimination arose from selection matters.

Selection in cricket is always a controversial and complex matter because of how many variables are involved in the game. It’s a bit like rugby in that you often don’t just choose your 11 or 15 best individual players. It’s about combinations and, in cricket especially, the balance of the team is so crucial.

And that balance has to be fit for purpose for whatever the conditions on the day or the opposition.

Adding to this already delicate mix is the fact that interfering with selection is official CSA policy; as Roger Telemachus testified this week, he had to be pulled from a 2007 World Cup match because there were no Black Africans in the XI.

The fact that it was Makhaya Ntini who was ‘forced’ into the team is interesting. The Mdingi Express was not only a vital beacon for transformation, but also a guaranteed selection for the vast majority of his career simply because of how great a fast bowler he was. But by 2007, especially on the low and slow pitches of the Caribbean, his white-ball form was declining.

Telemachus, a more skilful bowler in terms of slower balls, yorkers and other variations, was probably the better bet at that stage. Shaun Pollock, around about the same time, had to face similar pain as coach Mickey Arthur called time on his Test career because of his declining pace.

These are the sort of cricketing, rather than discriminatory, reasons that should definitely be considered by the SJN commission. As excellent a job as ombudsman Advocate Dumisa Ntsebenza and his two colleagues are doing, I do wish they had been given a cricketing expert to assist them – someone like Geoff Toyana.

The SJN’s shortcomings in this regard were shown when Ntsebeza asked Aaron Phangiso why Imran Tahir didn’t just stand down and give him a chance. Imagine Kagiso Rabada being asked to sit out and give Lutho Sipamla a go?

Phangiso was disgracefully treated in terms of selection in the 2015 World Cup, of that I have no doubt. For him to not play a single match was far more in need of intervention than the ill-fated make-up of the semifinal team. To not even play this quality left-arm spinner, known as ‘The Banker’ by his highly successful Highveld Lions team, against Ireland and the United Arab Emirates was appalling. The latter game was played on the isle of New Zealand, where the UAE were never going to stretch the Proteas. If South Africa felt Phangiso’s inclusion was somehow going to risk defeat, he should never have been in the World Cup squad in the first place.

But was this discrimination? The coach at the time – Russell Domingo – is Black, and so is the then-CEO, Haroon Lorgat, who had oversight over selection, with a majority Black board breathing down his neck.

I get the feeling from the many comments I have seen about former players ‘deserving’ better or ‘why weren’t they given more opportunity’, that many people don’t understand the nature of high-performance sport. Its about the best taking on the best. Of course in this country, with its history of oppression, there are mechanisms required to level the playing fields.

But no-one is entitled to be chosen, high performance sport is not about giving everyone a chance. It was also my dream to play first-class cricket, but I wasn’t good enough, end of story.

To see a former player with a batting average of 19.24 and strike-rate of 51 after 72 innings across the formats pose as a victim of a lack of opportunity is sad. He also said CSA is full of white bosses, which is totally at odds with the actual situation in a boardroom that has been majority Black for a long time.

I fully support Ntsebeza in this vital initiative to try and fix our cricket. But he is going to need the Wisdom of Solomon and some real cricket experts to do that.

The first week of the Social Justice and Nation-Building hearings have been a mere aperitif for what I sense many people are hoping are more sensational revelations from next week when former players start appearing before Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza, the ombudsman appointed by Cricket South Africa.

But in many ways, this week’s “scene-setters”, as Ntsebeza has called them, have provided vital testimony because they have given a factual account of the transformation policies of CSA and how they have changed through the years. There have been successes, but there have been failures as well and surely no-one can question that the national team is not as transformed as it should be nearly 30 years after Unity.

The SJN commission did not have a promising start though. The first witness was Dr Eugenia Kula-Ameyaw, which was fair enough because the SJN was largely her idea. But the former CSA independent director produced a couple of hours of largely incoherent testimony riddled with factual errors. As a former Board member, how does she not know that the players’ association (SACA) don’t pay the players’ salaries?!

She then thought it would be appropriate to give Ntsebeza a cricket bat, signed by her, to commemorate the occasion. The ombudsman looked bemused and it was telling that he never mentioned Kula-Ameyaw’s presentation again during the week.

It was onwards and upwards from there though as Advocate Norman Arendse, former CSA president and current independent director, and Max Jordaan, CSA’s head of transformation, spoke of the steps taken to ensure equal opportunities for all before cricket was captured and the likes of Kula-Ameyaw took the reins.

Mary-Anne Dove, a doctor of sports and exercise science whose thesis was on the role of socio-ecological factors in talent development in sport, gave insights into how targets or quotas have to be accompanied by development and other interventions, and Zola Thamae, a former Board member and manager of the Proteas women’s team, gave shocking evidence of how the women’s national team was treated a decade ago.

Professor Richard Calland, an expert on sustainable governance and organisational culture, gave an interesting presentation too.

It is clear that CSA have made a meal of transformation, but it does not matter how many Black player quotas or targets they have, the failure of the Proteas to be truly representative of the country is firstly down to socio-economic issues.

Jordaan, who has been at CSA for 20 years, apart from the disingenuous comment that “nobody is missing out on selection because we are juggling numbers”, made the salient points that when the Proteas won the ICC mace for being top of the Test pile, targets were in place, and that transformation has to start at the many non-former-Model C and private schools and at clubs, but CSA runs into difficulties when they try and improve facilities in these areas due to recalcitrant city councils and the lack of support from the department of education.

Jordaan gave the example of a cricket facility in Welkom being taken over by the local council, who built a casino instead on the land, and buildings in townships “disappearing brick-by-brick”.

Instead of just congratulating themselves for having ticked the box of having a certain number of Black players in the Proteas and domestic teams (which is not a valid measure of transformation success because teams are forced to meet the racial targets), cricket needs to firstly make sure the pipeline at grassroots is working.

I believe CSA have actually done okay in this regard and have worked very hard to keep the pipeline flowing. But there is no doubt Black players still predominantly come from the former Model C and private schools – a much smaller pool.

This is due to structural, systemic problems that only national and local government can fix, especially with the currently constrained financial resources of CSA.

The frustration of Black African cricketers was evident in the presentations of Johannesburg coach David Mashiyi and former player Zonde Mbekeni.

The fact that Mbekeni feels as frustrated and angry about the lack of opportunities for Black Africans as he did in his playing days back in the 1970s is not okay.

But in many ways it boils down to a struggle for scant resources and opportunities.

In an exceptional act of co-operation between his current and former clubs, scrumhalf Ivan van Zyl will not be going to England this week to start his new career with Saracens but will instead enjoy the privilege of playing against the British and Irish Lions on Saturday as he makes one last appearance for the Bulls.

The 26-year-old Springbok’s contract with the Bulls ended on June 30 but Saracens and his former employees came to an agreement that Van Zyl can play on Saturday in what many rugby players consider to be one of the highlights of their careers.

“I’m very fortunate to get the opportunity to still play this game because my contract ended last week but an arrangement was made, which is very nice of the Bulls and Saracens. I’m very thankful for the opportunity, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and then I will be leaving. But playing against the Lions, you just want to play well, playing at that level is where you want to be.

“You want to measure yourself against the best in the world and if you perform you hope all the right people see that. It’s also about the confidence you get if you do play well, but we are all going to have to be at the top of our game against the Lions,” Van Zyl confirmed on Monday.

Chasing the game is never a good thing in rugby, and Van Zyl warned that if the Bulls do not match the Lions physically then that’s exactly what they will be doing.

“The big difference between the international and the provincial game is the physical part, that will be the big thing against the Lions. They also want to play quicker, move the ball around more in preparation for the Springboks so they can move the pack around. It’s why they’ve chosen guys like Hamish Watson and Sam Simmonds with their pace. So we must match their intensity as well.

“But we must match them physically first in order to go forward, we must be physical and direct. But we need the complete game – we can’t just run everything but we also can’t just kick everything away either. It’s about finding the balance and kicking at the right time. So we are going to need the complete performance and making the right decisions at the right time,” Van Zyl said.

New Bulls captain Marcell Coetzee might not go so far as to consider Sean Everitt as something akin to an uncle, but the Sharks coach admitted it is going to be tough seeing his former protégé leading the opposition in their decisive Rainbow Cup match in Durban on Saturday.

Coetzee started his professional career with the Sharks, having been schooled at Port Natal High School, and it was Everitt, then in charge of youth rugby at Kings Park, who guided him through the process of being a talented player from an unfashionable rugby school, through age group rugby to being nominated for SA Rugby’s Young Player of the Year award in 2012. Three years later Coetzee made his Springbok debut and he moved to Ulster in 2016, where he established himself as a superstar.

“Marcell will always have a special place in Sharks fans’ hearts and it’s going to be quite sore to see him captain the Bulls after we brought him through from Port Natal. He was magnificent last weekend and he’s been very good for Ulster too. But our guys want to prove themselves against the best and he’s certainly been one of the best in Europe.

“Marcell is motivated every week he puts on a rugby jersey, but he probably sees a bit of a gap in the Springbok set-up with Duane Vermeulen’s injury, and I’m sure there was a lot of disappointment at being left out so I have no doubt he wants to really put his hand up against us,” Everitt said.

Bulls coach Jake White is never shy to milk any sort of psychological advantage he can get and he was not slow to point out the difficulties facing the Sharks as they look to beat the Bulls with a bonus point,  while also denying the visitors any log points, if Everitt is to take his team to Treviso next week for the Rainbow Cup final rather than to Kimberley for their Currie Cup opener.

”The Sharks are a good side, probably the one side that has consistently really pushed us and they play  a solid, certain style of rugby. They will be motivated because they have to beat us comfortably, but in trying to play a bit differently, there’s the risk that they will present us with opportunities if their efforts don’t come off.

“If you try and run everything and you’ve never trained that way, then it could lead to disaster. It’s going to be interesting to see how they adapt to that. We know we just need one point, which we get if we score four tries, so we will also be going flat out for that. It’s like 50-over cricket, you know you can bat through the overs, but you need to score runs as well,” White said.