KEVIN MCCALLUM: SA Test cricket sizzles out into sparedom

One of these days, you can be sure, someone will write a book about the travails of SA Test cricket and the 2022/2023 tour of Australia. They will write of how the original and grandest form of international cricket somehow became an outcast, a bit-part player, in the sport’s family, despite it being so loved. 

They may write of betrayal and love unrequited, of moments in history when the SA Test side felt its relationship with the International Cricket Council (ICC) and Cricket SA was left to meander along a road to nowhere, with things left unsaid and the wrong words chosen. They may mention the other issue in the relationship, the one that turned heads with its empty heart and deep pockets, selling off its negotiable affection to the highest bidder.

T20 cricket is what Elvis Costello would have called the “cigarette girl in the sizzle-hot pants”. They may call this book Spare. It will sell millions. Or not. 

SA Test cricket has become the ginger kid, the man formerly known as prince. You feel deep affection for it, it’s usually always around, but right now you aren’t sure you want to see them all the time nor allow them to marry your spawn. You feel, as did the Australians, from the commentators to the players to the writers for the Proteas, sympathy for Test cricket, but, in the same way you feel sympathy for a beggar. 

That is what SA Test cricket is in danger of becoming, standing at traffic lights outside the ICC offices in Dubai asking for small change, an Oliver Twist asking for another bowl of gruel: “Please, sir. Can I have some more?” 

I’m afraid there won’t be much more, not for some time to come. Players such as Khaya Zondo who believe SA’s inexperienced batting needs more time in the middle, have just three more Tests in 2023. He lamented the lack of first-class cricket, which he will only get to play a month hence. His laments will fall on deaf ears. 

The new SA white ball coach is to be named on Monday. One candidate, Lance Klusener, has already ruled himself out to focus on T20 franchise cricket. Enoch Nkwe, Cricket SA’s director of cricket, will wait for a while to name the Test coach. Tough love for Test cricket. 

And so to the SA20, which, as the Guardian reminded us on Thursday, does not have a “T” in the title, which could be a prescient omission. “There is no ‘T’ in SA20 and maybe no future for a venerable SA Test side,” ran the Guardian headline. 

That is not the only thing that makes it different, wrote Andy Bull, also in the Guardian: “It’s that SA have put the SA20 at the front and centre of the game, ahead of Test, one-day and domestic cricket. SA cricket has gone past the tipping point. Their men’s team only have 28 Tests scheduled in the next four-year cycle (India have 38, Australia 40 and England 43) because the board have pretty much given up scheduling three-Test series.”

The franchise sides that competed in first-class cricket for the past 17 years have been scrapped, replaced by 15 provincial teams split into two divisions, who will play their fixtures in the margins of the season.

Dean Elgar and the dwindling band of Test match specialists who just got beaten so badly in Australia are not scheduled to play another first-class game until February 12. 

The SA20 is utterly necessary to drag Cricket SA out of its financial quagmire, but will it, as assumed, raise the money that will enable the body to pay for first-class cricket and development, or will it merely fill the pockets of a gilded few?

What or where is the balance? As Mike Atherton wrote in The Times on Thursday: “The game more broadly has yet to find an answer to this question, with franchise cricket and representative cricket set on very different paths.” 

Atherton also quoted Gideon Haigh, the fine Australian cricket writer, who wrote in The Australian: “In the push to engage and detain the casual consumer, there has become something for everyone, although almost too much for anyone. It’s an awkward feeling — to love cricket, but also to know it is on somewhere and not really care, because it has been routinised away from any sense of specialness.” 

This is where cricket is at, beholden to a form that is the cigarette girl in the sizzle-hot pants. Test cricket has become the Spare.