Ken Borland

Cricket South Africa Director of Cricket Graeme Smith on Saturday described all the leaks coming from the organisation – many of which have promoted falsehoods targeting him personally – as a “cancer” and said the e-mails he had sent to the Board complaining about them had not yet been addressed.

Smith has even had his contract details leaked to the media and there was also a fraudulent document circulated which alleged he was a shareholder in 3TCricket.

“These leaks are a cancer within the organisation and you just wonder who in a senior position would do this? What is their end goal? It’s clearly a high-profile person because of some of the stuff that has been leaked. This kind of thing doesn’t help build relations, it feels like some people have ulterior motives, so we end up spending all our time speaking about these things and not the game.

“I have written a few e-mails about it to the president [Chris Nenzani], the board and the company secretary [Welsh Gwaza], who has been part of all my processes. And there hasn’t been a huge response. But it was good to see the president put a few things straight in an article today and there are a lot of very good people in CSA, especially at staff level, in cricket services,” Smith said in a teleconference on Saturday.

While Smith defended his appointment as director of cricket, saying he had gone through the whole chain of appropriate processes, and was keen to continue in the role, he added that he would step aside if there was someone better equipped for the job. He also defended his choice of Mark Boucher as national coach.

“I feel I have been extremely unfairly targeted over the appointments, I feel there’s a bit of an agenda. It comes back to why I got into the job in the first place – I wanted to put cricket straight and improve CSA as an organisation – and CSA courted me for a while. I went through the interview process and initially turned the job down. But in the absolute chaos of last December I decided I wanted to be part of the solution.

“I don’t feel like I’m going to be perfect or not get anything wrong, but my intentions and value system are good. But if someone can do a better job then they must tell me. I did not appoint myself, I went through a rigorous interview process presided over by mainly Black African people. You ask yourself what you can achieve in this role, but that’s why I decided to sign an extension to my contract.

“In terms of Mark Boucher, the team need a strong leader and he’s done enough coaching at domestic level and had a lot of success, his personality and experience is what was needed. He and Enoch Nkwe [assistant coach] can form a strong partnership, that’s an important dynamic. They are the right team to take the Proteas forward … theoretical qualifications are not the be-all and end-all,” Smith said.

It took some daring for Smith to accept the post of director of cricket back in December and South Africa’s most successful captain described CSA as being in “chaos” at the time.

“I fearfully got involved in December in a situation that was chaos, absolute chaos, there was zero trust between anyone. There’s still an element of internal agendas pulling in a lot of different directions and I would like to align those. Life was a lot simpler as a broadcaster! But I was sad to see South African cricket fall from its perch, that’s why I got involved.

“It’s feeling chaotic again, so I keep revisiting why I took the job in the first place. But you ask yourself lots of questions – What are the motives? What is the end game? What are these people trying to create because in the end it’s only the game that suffers. But I was captain for a long time so I have formulated ways of dealing with the stresses and public pressures of a high-profile job,” Smith said.

While Smith’s decision to take a knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement during the 3TCricket Solidarity Cup went down like a flat beer with those of a right-wing persuasion, the director of cricket said he did it to show he is serious about creating a South African cricket culture in which everyone can feel comfortable.

“The BLM movement provided the opportunity for everyone to have an open discussion before the Solidarity Cup, which is why we all decided to take a knee, to show solidarity to creating a better environment going forward. We’ve got to create a culture where everyone feels safe to talk. I was most surprised that players did not feel they had a voice in the past. “As far as I was aware, there have always been channels, but obviously these players did not feel that way, so hopefully we can improve on that. I was very taken aback by Makhaya Ntini’s stuff. When I came into the team, I never thought of him as being the silent type, he was a senior player then. He gave me a different explanation when I asked him about running to the ground and not taking the bus,” Smith said.

In the first two editions of the Mzansi Super League (MSL), feted cricketers like AB de Villiers and Chris Gayle have been marquee players allocated to one of the teams but that is all set to change, along with many other aspects, in this year’s T20 carnival.

The third instalment of the MSL will see only eight CSA-contracted players allocated to teams. The plan is for each of the eight franchises to then be able to choose one Kolpak or non-contracted South African and one overseas player from the draft.

In that way the MSL draft will become a much more exciting extravaganza with the eight teams competing for some truly top-class attractions. It means someone like De Villiers, who is a non-contracted player, will no longer be allocated to the Tshwane team but will no doubt cause something akin to a bidding war amongst the eight teams as he will be available on the draft. And there will also be much jostling for international players, who have been of mixed quality over the first two seasons.

Quinton de Kock, formerly of the Cape Town Blitz, has been mooted as the new marquee player for the Centurion-based side.

The other change will be in the names of the teams. The six domestic franchises will now be able to choose whether to continue with their MSL brands or revert back to their own names – i.e. Cobras, Dolphins, Knights, Lions, Titans and Warriors.

It means cheesy names like the Tshwane Spartans, which have developed little traction with fans (what are Spartans anyway?), will be ditched.

Franchises will also be able to source their own sponsors and will share in whatever profits the tournament makes.

A new broadcast deal has yet to be signed for MSL III, but CSA are known to have offered the rights to SuperSport. The first two editions of the MSL were broadcast for free by the SABC, contributing to the massive losses the tournament made.

The monotony of Lockdown has sent many people out to lunch but for Quinton de Kock the same simple ‘see ball, hit ball’ approach that makes him such a great cricketer has seen him get through the winter so far in typically phlegmatic fashion.

Named CSA’s Men’s Cricketer of the Year at the weekend, De Kock said he has not hit a single ball since the end of last season, but is comfortable that there is plenty of time for him to launch a reinvigorated assault on the bowlers of the world.

In 2019/20, De Kock scored 536 runs in seven Tests at an average of 38.28, with one century and four fifties, while he has also averaged 38, with one century and four half-centuries, in 15 ODIs in the last year. He also reached fifty four times in eight T20 Internationals, averaging a remarkable 48.42 at a strike rate of 167.

The left-handed wicketkeeper/batsman scored more Test runs in 2019 than any other Protea (713, 216 more than Faf du Plessis), but has set his sights on scoring more hundreds in the coming season.

“I’ve had the world’s best Lockdown, I’ve been very busy doing nothing. I’ve kept up with my fitness and training in the gym, but I’m based in a very remote place [Garden Route] and there’s not much cricket around here. But practice is mostly muscle memory and there’s still so much time before our next game, you could end up hitting balls for no reason. I needed the break and tried to stay away from cricket.

“But in terms of fulfilling my potential, I would only rank myself about 6.5 out of 10. I had too many starts without progressing, I’m tough on myself and to be honest I’d love to convert those starts into even bigger runs. I wanted to come up the order, I’m happy at five for now and I feel that I can score big hundreds there,” De Kock said after also being named Test Cricketer of the Year and Players’ Player of the Year.

One thing De Kock was adamant about is that he is not going to try and take on the Test captaincy as well as his role as white-ball skipper, wicketkeeper and key batsman.

“Mark Boucher and I had an informal chat and I said I wasn’t sure about the Test captaincy. It would be too much to handle, I realise that now, to be wicketkeeper and captain, I don’t need all that stress, I could see that a mile away,” De Kock said.

Laura Wolvaardt was named the Women’s Cricketer of the Year, largely on the back of her superb performances in steering South Africa to the semi-finals of the ICC World T20 in Australia, and the 21-year-old said the Proteas will try their utmost to do even better in their 50-over World Cup scheduled for January.

“Our main focus has been that ODI World Cup for the last three-and-a-bit years and once we start playing again it will be full steam ahead towards that. The T20 World Cup in Australia will always have a special place in my heart, just the way the team played and the brand of cricket we produced was very special. It was incredible how we performed.

“I definitely did not see all this success coming at all at the start of the season, especially my role at five in the T20s, and I’m very glad it went well. It was the magical idea of the selectors to move me there because I’d had struggles in the powerplay up front. It gave me more freedom once the field was spread, I could rotate the strike a bit more while getting set,” Wolvaardt said.

SA Rugby CEO Jurie Roux said recently that every union whether provincial or international is going to join up with private equity partners either sooner or later. Rugby has been one of the slowest sports to embrace professionalism though and I can hear many fans wailing that private equity is going to ruin the game.

“Private equity in rugby will have a massive influence, it will probably control rugby. And yes, SA Rugby is in discussions with private firms, but I don’t think there’s a union that’s not talking to someone. We all live in a post-Covid world that is now a much smaller pond and there is the opportunity now for investors to buy things at much cheaper prices. Private equity is here to stay, you’ll either join early or late, but join you will,” Roux said in an online press conference earlier this month.

There is perhaps going to be understandable anxiety that rugby is going to end up in the same sort of mess as the Premier Soccer League has with the controversial sale of the famous BidVest Wits club to a little-known National First Division club, Tshakhuma Tsha Madzivhandila, based in Limpopo. Thanks to BidVest cynically pulling the plug based purely on financial considerations, 99 years of history is down the drain, a club that has won nine top-flight trophies and produced players such as Gary Bailey, Peter Gordon, Richard Gough, Sam Magalefa, Thulani Hlatshwayo and Benson Mhlongo for all intents and purposes no longer exists.

Never mind Western Province leaving Newlands, can you imagine the outrage if it was announced that the Bulls were moving to Polokwane and would henceforth be known as the Buffaloes?

But let me allay your fears by pointing out that rugby has mechanisms in place to prevent such stupid things from happening.

Before going to market, a union will split its assets between a commercial/professional arm, which will largely deal with corporate matters like sponsorships, advertising, marketing and broadcast deals, and an amateur arm which will hold assets like the stadium (whether they own it or have a rental deal) and ‘intellectual property’ like the team name.

Stakeholders can then buy shares in the commercial/professional arm. A private company can buy 25% of those shares and the union gets the cash, while the equity partner takes dividends while also hopefully driving up the commercial value of those properties.

Even though SA Rugby’s constitution now allows for private companies to own up to 74% of a union’s professional arm, as long as the ‘amateur’ administrators have done their paperwork correctly then properties like the team name or where they play should be totally protected even if the union is now a minority shareholder.

The Bulls have been amongst the first unions to really make private equity work for them, with Patrice Motsepe’s African Rainbow Capital Investments and Johann Rupert’s Remgro each owning 37% of the Blue Bulls Company. First prize to them because the influx of cash has allowed the Bulls to hire big-name coaches in John Mitchell and now Jake White, who is totally revamping the team with a host of quality additions to the player roster.

Perhaps the first thing for a union to ensure is that there is synergy between themselves and their private equity partners, so that they can work together to run a successful team.

Unfortunately there have been two unions in the news lately for getting it all wrong – the Eastern Province Rugby Football Union and the Western Province Rugby Football Union. Both those beleaguered unions seem to be suffering from a bunch of rank amateurs trying to run multimillion rand businesses.

After years of wrangling seemed to be coming to an end with the signing of heads of agreement to sell Newlands to Investec, WPRFU president Zelt Marais has unilaterally decided not to sign off on the rest of the deal, despite already taking an advance of more than R50 million from Investec. Interestingly, the WPRFU also owe Remgro R58 million for a loan. These are powerful enemies to have and one fears that the once proud union could be heading the same way as Eastern Province.

The embattled Port Elizabeth franchise just seems to lurch from one crisis to the next and fresh problems are now springing up between the company that holds the majority shareholding in the Southern Kings and the EPRFU.

Roux was not specifically talking about the Southern Kings or Western Province, but his message certainly applies to them when he said political interference tends to surface when administrators try to run their franchises as an amateur entity.

But to borrow from Saturday Citizen deputy editor Brendan Seery’s excellent Column, for every couple of Onions that have to be dished out to unions, there will be more Orchids given out to those who make private equity work.

Simply put, rugby is unable to survive this post-Covid world without them so, like the Wallabies and scrums, every union just has to find a way of making these partnerships work.