Good old Cricket SA. If it is not playing catch-up with an issue it should have sorted out ages ago, it is creating a Kock-up so confusing and messy it starts a schoolyard brawl that ends in tears.
Quinton de Kock has apologised and will take the knee when SA play Sri Lanka on Saturday. In his statement issued on Thursday, he said he had made himself unavailable for selection against the West Indies because he didn’t want to take the knee because “I felt like my rights were taken away when I was told what we had to do in the way that we were told”.
They were told on the bus on the long journey to play the West Indies. The board had met on Monday night and decided the entire team should take the knee before every game. The press release on the directive went out at 10.47am on Tuesday. At 1.02pm, another Cricket SA release “noted” De Kock’s decision, ending with the paragraph: “Cricket SA thanks all other Proteas players for agreeing to unite and make such an important public stand against racism.”
The inference was pretty blunt with that last paragraph. De Kock refused to make a public gesture against racism. Social media did its nut, split down, mostly, racial lines. Anti-Black Lives Matter and anti-antifa were anti the board telling people what to do. This is the “no politics in sport” brigade, the “haven’t we apologised enough for apartheid” mob that would like SA to quietly go on the way it did before apartheid.
One supporter congratulated De Kock for standing up against “tyranny”. Tyranny? Tyranny is not being told to take a knee. Tyranny is being black and denied the vote, beaten into submission, sent to live in a homeland away from white people, driven into poverty with every basic human right taken away. That’s tyranny. They called it apartheid.
De Kock’s apology sounds heart-felt and sincere, if a little disjointed and bemusing. “I won’t lie, I was shocked that we were told on the way to an important match that there was an instruction that we had to follow, with a perceived ‘or else’. I don’t think I was the only one,” De Kock wrote.
Well, no, he wasn’t. Six out of 15 players did not take the knee before the loss to Australia on Saturday. They were all white. It was not just bad “optics”, but it spoke to the past of the country, a history we are still trying to overcome. It looked black and white, when it should have looked unified.
The board’s chair, Lawson Naidoo, has admitted the timing of the directive was off, just hours before a game. It should have happened after the Australia match. Hell, it should have happened when Lungi Ngidi first spoke out. It should never have been left to the players to decide. Some have immense pressure put on them by family and friends not to take the knee, no matter what they personally believe.
Perhaps they should each be asked, privately, why they will not kneel, what is it about the gesture that galls them so? It’s the look of the thing, a sense of a cracked changing room, a them-and-us set-up.
The Cricket for Social Justice and Nation-building hearings roll on and the testimonies of those players involved in match-fixing is starting to be questioned. Ombud Dumisa Ntsebeza finally admitted he had come to believe the testimonies of Lonwabo Tsotsobe, Alviro Petersen, Thami Tsolekile and Ethy Mbhalati were a “red herring”.
“I was alarmed by half of the presentations made before us and I asked myself where is this going to?” Ntsebeza said. “I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it as my gut feeling is that I allowed a runaway horse to get out of the stable. It’s like a red herring. It has taken my concentration off what should be my mandate.”
That, sir, was the point. They played you, saw the hearings as a way to clear their names of the stink of corruption by exaggerating, fudging and being deliberately vague with the truth. The hearings are, by their nature, flawed, but also necessary. They are an acknowledgement of the wrongs and injustices, and also the work by others to transform cricket.
The truth is in there somewhere. Perhaps there will be a little more unity in the sport at the end of it all.
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