Transcripts of unscripted speech do favours to very few people. The vast majority of us can be made to look silly with a word-for-word written presentation of our attempts to explain something off the cuff, especially if it’s complicated and/or emotional. And especially if it necessarily includes some compromising of the truth. So try to […]
Back in 2005 South Africa traveled to Australia with high hopes of becoming the first team from these shores to win a Test series down under. They lost 2-0 and Shane Warne described them as “the worst South African team to visit these shores.” It may have been a throwaway line, but the words stung […]
Finally some news about the new T20. It is going to be named, soon, and so will the teams, and they will be given names, too, and colours. All this is imminent. The chief executives of the successful stadiums (and or Franchises) will automatically qualify to be the managers of the new teams. They will also […]
Financial reporting is best left to financial reporters, I’ll be the first to admit. It would be as unfair and unkind (but amusing) to expect them to explain reverse swing as it would be for a sports reporter to explain macro-economics. Or macro anything for that matter.
It may be hyperbole to suggest the ‘cricket playing world’ has its eyes on South Africa this week but it is certainly true that administrators, marketers, advertisers, broadcasters and many of the top players in the world – and every professional here – are watching T20 developments with a keen eye. In some cases it […]
In a typically brilliant article on the importance of learning your trade from senior players and others who have walked the path before you, former England captain Michael Atherton traced the lineage of his country’s opening batsman through the last half a century and made the point that there was always an established number one […]
She had been literally unable to accept the possibility that the match against Sri Lanka at Kingsmead would not restart – could not face the appalling reality that the host nation would not be featuring in the knockout stages, never mind winning it. Having dedicated much of the preceding four years of her life to the team and the event, she had been willingly persuaded that this was South Africa’s ‘time.’ An hour after the match was abandoned she was in a state of clinical shock.
The T20 Global League’s collapse is having a far greater impact on South African cricket than any of us could have imagined. Instead of a scenario in which the country’s best player are incentivised to stay at home and commit themselves to playing in, and for, South Africa, they are now facing the same financial conundrum that existed in the early 2000s when rewards were so overwhelmingly weighted towards playing overseas that many felt they had no alternative.
There appears to be an increasing understanding that bilateral series have a limited life-span, at least as far as the cricket watching public is concerned. The elite Test series are, for the moment, exempt from the ‘ennui’ the public feel about much of the international game. South Africa’s Test series against India was a glorious […]
Already there were a lot of comments about the different pitch conditions. Faff said he asked for a typical South African pitch, but he did not get it at Centurion and the Wanderers . Do you think the groundsmen understood what he wanted or were there external factors to blame? In the final test, Parthiv […]
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