Sports administration is a broad church, but if you’ll excuse some fairly extreme generalisation, it is my impression that the profession seems to attract five sorts of people.
The first is a former player who reached the top of their game without necessarily spending 15 years worshipped. They have a deep and unteachable knowledge of and feel for its culture, customs and psychosocial landscape, but since retiring in their late 30s they have worked hard to learn new managerial skills, applying themselves with the same discipline and adherence to a game plan that helped them come close to greatness.
The second is someone who was never good enough, ambitious enough, or simply lucky enough to play at the top level, but whose charm, supreme social skills and considerable professional abilities have kept them inside the sport’s ecosystem. Ask anyone and they’ll agree: decent wicketkeeper or scrumhalf in their day; excellent lawyer or accountant; superlative committee member.
The third is the hardcore, no-nonsense professional administrator; the technocratic problem-solver who might not even particularly enjoy the sport they’re running. But that doesn’t matter, because they’re not here to enjoy things: they’re here to work.
Any sport requiring intervention by a body like SASCOC is well and truly done: you might as well ask Vladimir Putin to monitor whether elections are free and fair in North Korea.
It doesn’t really matter if you’re asking them to establish a cricket clinic or a croissant factory: as long as you put a keyboard in front of them, a whiteboard next to them, and point them at a problem, they will produce strategies and reports until you pull out their plug and they power down for the night.
The fourth is a political apparatchik, parachuted in from on high with a mandate to change everything, a thesaurus of political buzzwords, and an extraordinary talent for injecting chaos into the most straightforward processes.
After a committee has spent an hour establishing that one plus one does, in fact, equal two, this person will raise a worried hand, their face a mask of concern, and ask: “I hear what you’re saying, but when we claim that one plus one equals two, what are we really saying? And in coming to this decision, are we not excluding three and four, who haven’t been included as role-players?”
Finally, there are those who are, well, none of the above.
They have no sporting pedigree or rapport with the players, no charm, no administrative skills and no desire to acquire them. They don’t even have particularly helpful political connections.
If they were slightly more ambitious or cunning they might have made it in local politics, or at least started their own companies selling nutritional supplements that contain no nutrients whatsoever.
But they haven’t, and so here they sit, slumped in their chairs around the boardroom table, slowly disappearing down into suits that are too big for them, glancing this way and that in a way that suggests they are either extremely suspicious of everyone in the room or are struggling to keep up with the conversation, both of which are probably true.
Perhaps because they are haunted by the secret knowledge that they are probably unemployable, they use all of their extremely limited talents to safeguard their position at all costs, with the result that they spend most of their time administering their own agendas and vendettas rather than the sport that pays their bloated salaries.
If a sport is lucky, healthy and supported by progressive politics, it can expect the first three types to predominate.
If it is like most South African sports, it can expect a fair mix of all five.
But if it is particularly unlucky, and has allowed a culture of secrecy and Big Man feudalism to take hold – if, in short, its boardrooms are packed with the fourth and fifth sort of administrator – then it is in a death spiral.
Right now, South African cricket is in that spiral. Any sport requiring intervention by a body as disgraced, disdained and dysfunctional as SASCOC is well and truly done: you might as well ask Vladimir Putin to monitor whether elections are free and fair in North Korea.
As the summer season approaches, South African cricket has reached its lowest point since readmission. Hansie Cronje fixed matches, but even he couldn’t do the kind of systemic damage that the current lot have managed.
The Proteas languish in the bottom half of the Test rankings. Domestic cricket aspires to mediocrity.
We are now what the West Indies were in the late 1990s: a macabre lesson in how to implode a winning culture. Twenty years later, the West Indies are clawing back some pride, but they remain the third-worst Test team in the world. How low will the Proteas go and for how long?
No. A clean-up is not enough. The whole thing must be burned to the ground and salt ploughed into the ruins.
