Disquieting parallels between SA and Sri Lankan cricket

On Monday night Kumar Sangakkara gave the annual Colin Cowdrey Spirit of Cricket Lecture at Lord's in London. It was a long lecture, detailing Sri Lanka's colonial past, the rise of a Sri Lankan style of cricket and the island's recent, sometimes horrendously brutal, civil war.

Sangakkara also took the opportunity to discuss the maladministration of contemporary Sri Lankan cricket. He identified the 1996 World Cup victory as a watershed moment, a fracturing which lead to the replacement of a generation of essentially selfless amateur administrators by a self-serving elite with tentacles reaching into the corrupt caverns of everyday Sri Lankan life, including the bookmaking industry.

He also made the point that cricket is heavily politicised in Sri Lanka because the casting vote on the appointment of board members and team selection comes from the minister of sport.

"It was and still is confusing. Accusations of vote-buying and rigging, player interference due to lobbying from each side and even violence at AGMs, including the brandishing of weapons and ugly fist fights, have characterised cricket board elections for as long as I can remember," he said.

If the parallels are not by now apparent, they never will be. Sangakkara's lecture - dubbed by Peter Roebuck in Cricinfo this week as "the most important speech in cricket history" - might, in many respects, have been applied to local cricket. There are some differences, certainly, but it is a pointed comment on the parochialism of the SA sporting media that the lecture received little space and even less comment in our papers.

Sangakkara's lecture is not only valuable in and of itself, the rare instance of player speaking truth to power, but because the long-awaited findings of KPMG's forensic audit into Cricket SA's (CSA) affairs should be made to John Blair, the chairman of CSA's audit committee, by the time they next meet, on July 22.

Opinion is divided on what will be uncovered and how the audit's parameters will be interpreted, but my information is that a great deal has been laid bare.

Plunder, fraud and dubious funding of birthday parties are the order of the day. The cricket-loving public trusts that Blair, who has shown himself to be as tempted by petty politics as many of his colleagues - it was he, after all, who was in a position of authority during the Diteko Modise scandal - will do the right thing as CSA go for a wholesale clean out.

Indeed, my information is that CSA have already forked out R5-million for audits, investigations and lawyers' fees, with KPMG charging a "blended rate" of R1490 per hour for the organisation's latest forensic investigation.

Such facts didn't appear in press releases when they went on their damage limitation initiative after the Sunday Times broke the story of the latest round of bonuses they awarded themselves. The justification for the bonuses was that CSA had just experienced a bumper financial year. Surely the prudent thing to do in flush times is to squirrel your profits away.

Bangladesh and New Zealand might be your incoming tourists next year; there might be no Moses Mabhida concert or T20 game against India, and the Champions League will be a footnote in the as-yet-untold history of limited overs cricket.

To be accurate to my comparison between Sangakkara's depiction of Sri Lankan cricket and the local scene, there are important differences between the two. For the most part, selection remains the ambit of selectors locally; matches are played and opponents fought, there is no rigging or "spot-fixing".

There is a distance between players and administrators and there is a culture of excellence based on healthy competition within franchises. We are some distance away, then, from what Sangakkara describes. Or are we? The coming days will confirm whether our cricket administrators are tin-pot generals or men and women who have the game, not personal enrichment, at heart.