It is no coincidence that the announcement of Graeme Smith’s temporary and short-term appointment as Director of Cricket in South Africa was made by interim chief executive Jacques Faul rather than the defunct president, Chris Nenzani. I say ‘Director of Cricket in South Africa’ rather than CSA’s Director of Cricket because, although Smith may be […]
There were many interesting aspects of CSA president Chris Nenzani’s press conference on Saturday, not least his refusal to apologise for the humiliating judgement handed down by Advocate Ginsburg SC in the case against the Western Province Cricket Association. “We need to get it right the next time we exercise our ‘step-in’ rights,” Nenzani said. […]
The revocation of five journalists accreditations last weekend was a horrible embarrassment for Cricket South Africa – they had no idea of the international outrage it would cause – but it was also a great shame that it distracted attention from the two, far more serious issues. Good governance and the England tour are far […]
Dean Elgar and Aiden Markram will, presumably, be restored at the top of the order in the first Test against England now that Markram has learnt that walls generally put up a decent defence if you pick a fight with one. The middle order is far less certain after the calamitous tour of India but […]
Last year, before the Cricket South Africa board was marginalised by a restructure which allowed chief executive Thabang Moroe to assume greater control and make operational decisions without having to defer to the directors, they voted to allow the first edition of the Mzansi Super League to go ahead on the proviso that it did […]
Corrie van Zyl has been a general manager at Cricket South Africa since 2009. Before that, he was a long-serving coach of Free State, the Diamond Eagles and then the Knights. Before that, he enjoyed a 12-year career as a player spanning 104 first-class matches culminating in two ODIs on the ground-breaking tour of the […]
There’s something instinctively dull, disinteresting and disappointing about off-field disputes in sport, especially when they involve administrators. It’s perfectly understandable – the reason we follow sport, after all, is to escape the real world. But in the case of South African cricket and the toxic relationship between the country’s professional players and their national bosses, […]
The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the highly anticipated Players Draft for ‘The Hundred’ was an underwhelming affair characterised by a series of selections and omissions described, variously, as ‘strange’, ‘unexpected’ and ‘hard to understand’. Chris Gayle and Lasith Malinga’s names were left in the hat, undrawn, as were those of Kagiso […]
Reassuring a cricketer about his value to the team is not the same as making him undroppable. The former is a good thing; the latter can have the opposite effect. Few players are indispensable to the teams they play in, and even when they reach that status it doesn’t last forever. Not usually, anyway. Jacques […]
Back in the days when Gary Kirsten toured under the captaincy of Kepler Wessels and Hansie Cronje he would occasionally yearn for a day off, especially after four or five weeks on the road when it was abundantly obvious that the majority of the squad were going through the motions in the nets and gaining […]
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