Many professional cricketers gain weight and lose conditioning during the summer as their days are spent on the field or in the changeroom rather than on the road or in the gym. There is the food, too, naturally. No other sport stops for sandwiches midafternoon two hours after lunch. And there are the toasted sandwiches and evening meals.
We are talking about first-class cricket, of course, and habits have changed substantially over the years. At least one beneficial side-effect of SA having the slimmest first-class programme of any big cricket nation is that its players will be less likely to fail the skin-folds test.
Today marks the second of a four-day indaba of national coaches and provincial administrators to map out a way forward for the domestic game in the years to come. The players and coaches are unified in their assertion that seven four-day games per season in Division One is not just inadequate but positively detrimental to building a competitive Test team.
The administrators will, hopefully with appropriate transparency, explain that the game’s finances in SA cannot support the staging of more cricket. Which should lead to the most burningly pertinent question: How much do we care about Test cricket?
It is an easy question to answer emotionally. Almost no cricket followers will say “not much”. It is a much harder question to answer practically. The eight teams in Division One play each other once. Perhaps three more games could be added to their fixtures concentrating on derby matches, where possible, to cut back on air-travel and hotel accommodation. That’s before the discussion even starts about Division Two, in which the Free State now find themselves.
There were legitimate reasons for disbanding the six-franchise system and reverting to 14 provinces, even though there was widespread acknowledgement that it would be unsustainable in the long term. Each region was given a welcome return to autonomy on the understanding they would have to generate a substantial portion of their own income and carefully manage their own costs, including player budgets.
In the event the majority have relied entirely on Cricket SA funding for their existence and survival, many of whom were already in debt to Cricket SA which has loaned them in excess of a cumulative R250m in the past decade.
The provincial teams have been hustling and bustling in the first month of postseason, trading and dealing players to build their squads for next summer. Apart from their batting and bowling prowess, the ability to cheerfully withstand hard beds in hostel rooms and long kombie trips to get to and from matches might be a valuable asset.
But where, you may ask, is all the money brought in by the game-changing, game-saving SA20 in January? It will, and always would, take years for the trickle-down economics of effectively an Indian tournament to have any effect whatsoever on the parlous finances of SA’s domestic cricket. The SA20 is a wonderful thing which, hopefully, will grow into the second biggest T20 tournament in the world but the IPL owners are not cricketing philanthropists.
In just a few years time they will have signed as many as 50% of the world’s best T20 players to multiyear, exclusive contracts requiring them to play for their teams in the IPL, Caribbean Premier League, the SA20 and the ILT20 (as soon as the over-lapping clash between the latter two is resolved, which it will be).
It is in neither the Mumbai Indians interests nor those of Sunrisers Hyderabad, for instance, that Tristan Stubbs is a member of the former squad in India and the latter one in his home country. The IPL teams will find a mutually acceptable way to consolidate their assets and maximise brand exposure. The time is nigh when players will be asking their Indian franchises for permission to play for their countries rather than vice versa.
That might even work in SA’s favour. Far from having to retain control of their best players and fight the impossible battle of paying them as much as they can earn elsewhere, they will be able to call upon players with greater skills than they can acquire playing sporadically against each other here.
Of course, most of them wouldn’t be available for bilateral series but would be released for global events such as World Cups. The days of selecting only those players who play in domestic competitions — other than the SA20 — will soon be gone. Saudi Arabia’s entry into the IPL this year (Aramco) and intention to fund their own T20 league — naturally “the richest in history” — has guaranteed that. And there will be no stopping for “tea”.
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