NEIL MANTHORP: SA20’s arrival is great for aspiring young cricketers

The inaugural SA20 player auction was marketed and promoted with a biting verve and intensity — it was the theatre and drama before the cricket. And that was understandable given the importance of squad assembly. It was also worth many millions of dollars in pre-tournament marketing. Potential supporters will have over four months to acquaint themselves with their new teams.   

The country’s best cricketers were cut up, diced and sliced to suit recipes and menus prepared by the chefs of the franchises, often not reflecting their value, worth or potential as individual cricketers. For every “glory” signing there were at least two or three non-signings representing not just immediately broken hopes but long-term periods of doubt and worry.    

What the SA20 has done is both dilute and then condense the pool of local talent which will represent the nation in its new league. The local players were diluted by the overseas players, of which there may be up to seven in each squad of 17 with just 10 locals.    

Of the 60 local players, 15 are already nationally contracted. A handful of others like Faf du Plessis are South African, although he has never actually retired internationally from the format but remains unavailable for Proteas selection. All the nationally contracted players were likely to be bought but were not (officially) guaranteed a place in any of the franchise squads.    

The pricing structure was bewildering from the start with three levels of “reserve” — R175,000, R850,000 and R1.7m for the “elite”. Before the auction it was hard to imagine which of the six teams would spend R1.7m of their approximate total budget of R34m ($2m) on 36-year-old former England captain Eoin Morgan, or indeed 38-year-old former New Zealand captain Ross Taylor.  

But they may well have been bought on Monday because building a squad at a player auction involves much more than buying “talent”. Quite apart from all the different “pieces” the coaching staff require, the left-arm spinners, the new-ball quicks, the wrist spinners, the “death over” specialists, the power-hitters and the “finishers”, they have a duty to the owners to win games. And that doesn’t always mean signing “big names” or exciting young talent — sometimes it requires the experience of an “old dog”.  But it does mean one less place for a cricketer with their careers in front of them rather than behind.      

For aspiring young cricketers in SA the arrival of the SA20 is exciting: it represents a local shop-window to display their home-grown talent and sell themselves to other leagues around the world and provide a springboard towards a successful and lucrative career. But for each one of those, there will be many, many more who get nothing but rejection and likely despair.    

The briefest of glances at the pre-auction player list provided unarguable proof that dozens of the country’s best, most exciting cricketers would be excluded from this new flagship event. There simply aren’t enough seats on board. And although there are many reasons far beyond their skill and potential for their non-selection, many will find it hard not to take the rejection personally.    

Perhaps the greatest challenge for the domestic provincial teams, for Cricket SA, and particularly for the SA Cricketers Association,  which has done most to assist professional players in the last decade, will be how they care for those left behind. In various parts of the world on Monday night there would have been some mildly disappointed international cricketers who were hoping for some extremely well-paid cricket at the backend of holiday season in SA next year.    

In various corners of SA, however, there sat young men — and a fair few of our own, highly talented and experienced “old dogs” — wondering whether their careers had either stalled at a critical stage or whether the game they had served for over a decade, and still had much to offer it, had tossed them aside as “used goods”.   

Monday night’s auction was marketed well beforehand and sold not just as an important event in the formation of the SA20, but as entertainment in itself. Over two millennia ago Romans watched two men fight to the death for their weekend thrills, or even an unarmed man against starved lions. Seems we haven’t moved on in every area of civilisation. Monday wasn’t about men’s lives, of course, but it was about their livelihoods. Handing lucrative contracts to unproven internationals from Sri Lanka and the Caribbean ahead of South African players with better records and potential will never sit easy because SA produces more quality cricketers than any other nation. Which is one of the reasons the six IPL teams bought the SA franchises. They were buying highly productive nurseries.    

The SA20 league is a good thing because it will fill the financial hole Cricket SA dug itself into over the last five years. The bells, whistles and bugles, the TV fanfare, it will be fun. The key to its long-term success will be to ensure that it does not become “exclusive” but remains accessible to all SA’s cricketers. Which, naturally, also means the establishment of a Women’s SA20. Soon.