The merciful end to a cricket season to forget

The early cancellation of the South African cricket season due to the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak was a swift and merciful end to a year that seemed to lurch from one disaster to another.

Here’s a wrap of a season that will forever demand an asterisk next to it in the South African cricket annals.

The state of the game: Administration

When talking about the uncertainty brought about by the coronavirus this week, acting Cricket SA chief executive Jacques Faul hypothesised: “What if the game falls over, it just can’t go on?”

Looking at the meltdown Cricket SA’s administration has gone through over the past six months, it’s a miracle the South African game didn’t go under.

Thabang Moroe, suspended chief executive.

As we speak, Cricket SA’s chief executive, Thabang Moroe, has been on suspension since December; many believe their president Chris Nenzani should have resigned with his board for dereliction of duty; their director of cricket, former Proteas captain Graeme Smith, is acting; the women’s and South Africa Under-19 coaching posts are up for renewal; and there’s no sponsor for the national men’s team.

(Standard Bank’s deal is supposed to run out at the end of the month.)

The state of the game: On the field

To carry on the narrative from the previous point, the Proteas don’t have a test captain after Faf du Plessis gave it up following a disastrous international summer.

The Proteas won just one out of five home series, the 3-0 whitewash of Australia in the final ODI series of the season, winning just seven of their 15 matches during that time.

Add the fact that they put on their worst performance at a World Cup last year and won just one test all year, and you have a team in crisis.

‘New management'

Former Proteas captain Smith, after many false starts, was brought in as director of cricket to lead the elite performance side of the game in a new direction.

When he brought former Proteas wicketkeeper Mark Boucher in, who, in turn, hired South Africa’s most prolific batsman Jacques Kallis as the batting consultant, there were accusations that he’d brought the old clique he was allegedly part of that ran the men’s team when he was captain.

Jacques Faul has taken over the running of Cricket SA. Picture: Lee Warren / Gallo Images

That they are all friends did little to dissipate the faint whiff of jobs for pals the country is so infamous for.

There was a tone deafness to contemporary South Africa in the new leadership’s claims that transformation was an “emotional” issue and that they “don’t see colour”.

And the lack of popularity with the wider audience of the game grew.

While all this obviously could have been done differently, one can’t ignore the collective experience of the new management team and their willingness to change results that have proved stubborn to turn around.

A question of style

While the results have been tough to turn around, the noticeable thing about the way the Proteas play under Boucher – the Proteas’ patron saint of lost causes when he was a player – is how they have done so without fear.

Win or lose, the countless players who have been tried by Boucher haven’t died wondering.

The catch with swinging for the fences is that, whether you get it right or wrong, you do so spectacularly – something that has been borne out by some of the blowouts the Proteas have suffered.

Those pesky 'positives'

It’s not very South African to go sifting for positives in a crash-and-burn season such as the one South African cricket has gone through.

But no cricket fan can ignore the South African women’s team going as far as the semifinals in the T20 World Cup in Australia.

It was a campaign in which they took the high road throughout, before the familiar foes of a run chase in the rain in Sydney and Duckworth Lewis thwarted them.

The encouraging thing about the men’s game is how selection has been opened to reward players who have done well in domestic cricket.

Pieter and Janneman Malan, Kyle Verreynne, Heinrich Klaasen, Lutho Sipamla and others have been rewarded with decent starts to their international careers.

The dozy looking Quinton de Kock has proven to have leadership qualities nobody suspected, and the Proteas look genuinely promising as a team.

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