If it is true that quotas played a part in the selection of South Africa's team to play in their losing semi-final against New Zealand at the Cricket World Cup, Cricket SA board members should bow their heads in shame.
They should also look at themselves in a mirror and ask themselves this question: Are you stupid?
Does transformation come before even a prize such as the World Cup title? Is a World Cup semi-final the place and time to regurgitate the bitterness of the past by going back to a system that should have been scrapped 10 years into the new democracy?
It is simply disgusting to think Chris Nenzani, Norman Arendse and their fellow board members might have perpetrated something like this.
The great Nelson Mandela endorsed the 1995 Springbok rugby team even though only one player of colour was in the World Cup winning lineup -- Chester Williams.
He also called for the springbok emblem to be retained. He knew how sporting success could build a nation.
Now that he has gone, these mealy mouthed little men continue to insult his legacy by allegedly doing repulsive things like this.
Were any of them there when the Springboks won the Rugby World Cup in 1995? Did any of them see the celebrations, the explosion of joy, in the streets around Ellis Park?
The win was celebrated by white, coloured, Indian and black alike, all of them overjoyed that their new democracy had achieved something so great.
I suspect they weren't there. I suspect that some of them even resented that win, because it set back their bitter campaigns.
All the cricketers are under contract. Their livelihood is cricket. Most of them have little else to turn to if they are banned from cricket.
So they can hardly be blamed for the conspiracy of silence following the revelations about the cricket semi-final in Auckland.
AB won't talk, coach Russell Domingo won't talk, it's unlikely Vernon Philander will talk, given that he is the centre of this storm of outrage. Will Kyle Abbott, the man who should have played in Philander's place talk?
It's doubtful. That team is tight. The players support and respect each other. Not one of them would want to do anything to undermine a team-mate.
So, who, apart from the secret sources named in the original story by our cricket writer, Telford Vice, will talk?
The only man who could possibly shed light on this is the convener of the cricket selection committee, Andrew Hudson, one of the most decent gentlemanly players who ever represented South Africa-- in fact, so decent, that getting involved in this kind of thing must leave him appalled -- and probably way out of his depth.
The Hudson we have known isn't this devious, he isn't this deceitful. He would want to play with a straight bat and, if he was ordered to play the unfit, out-of-form Philander, who went for 17 runs in his first over, it must have broken his heart.
Or has being part of cricket's highly politicised hierarchy contaminated him; has he been convinced that the wrong way is the right way?
The next few weeks are likely to be revealing. If he resigns, we will know that he has been unable to reconcile his conscience with the things he might have been forced to do.
If he doesn't, he is the one who will have to tell us: was Philander, who had a dreadful World Cup, a political plant or not.
If there was political intervention, then Cricket SA's radicals - politicians who shouldn't be in sport - will have to take responsibility for sabotaging the process of nation-building that such a big sporting triumph would further -- and, the very thing this country needs more than anything else.
As an afterthought, if a wildly over-extravagant, over-publicised and over dramatised inquiry had to be held into Hansie Cronje's match-fixing antics, then there should be an equally well publicised, judicial inquiry into these charges of political intervention because if there was, it would be every bit as dishonest as Cronje's actions were. Perhaps even more so.
Cricket a gentleman's game? No way; not in South Africa.
Source: http://www.timeslive.co.za/sport/cricket/2015/03/30/cricket-a-gentleman-s-game-no-ways-not-in-south-africa
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