By: Arthur Van Nel
I am disappointed that I looked forward to the new local football season with such a degree of anticipation. Not just as a Pirates Football Club supporter, mind you, but as a patriotic supporter of South African football as a whole.
Perhaps the recent goals festival, also known as Euro 2020, contributed to my never-say-die hope – increasingly a false hope nonetheless – that one day we could regain our dignity as the continent’s wealthiest football league. The football from the first rounds of respectively the MTN Top 8 and the Premier Soccer League have been particularly depressing. Just as well that the public is not yet permitted to pay to watch the vitiated quality passing as Premier League standard.
The same nausea festered in my guts as I read the first answering statement of the beleaguered Proteas coach, Mark Boucher. Nausea, because an inescapable confrontation with myself as to why I had renewed my hope that the Proteas can be extricated from its embedded racial fault lines, forced me to confess – to myself – that my false hope was nothing but self-inflicted trauma.
This is the Proteas, after all, the brand that thrives on deferring the accomplishment of real, permanent and sustainable change. To be true to them, as is the case with the PSL, they are not responsible for keeping our false hope alive. We are. Ir then at the very least, I am.
For starters, this is the same Mark Boucher who was parachuted from the Titans into the Proteas coaching job, passing much more qualified and experienced black coaches. Manifestly under-qualified and profoundly inexperienced, his colour and only his colour is the sole competitive advantage that propelled him pass Geoffrey Toyama, the former prolific Lions coach, and Herschelle Gibbs, who coaches across the world in super competitive leagues but can’t cut the grade at home because he dared to expose the player’s clique in his explosive book. Boucher’s old boy’s club accomplice, Graeme Smit, secured the hegemony of the rulership of whiteness of the game by handing this national treasure to an underprepared and out-of-depth Boucher.
It would appear Boucher had to repay his underserved ascension by:
a) continuing the extension of the nine lives of Aiden Markram by affording him incalculable opportunities at transitioning into the Proteas set-up,
b) extending the patronage he was afforded to AB de Villiers by irrationally pursuing the latter for a Proteas recall for the T20 World Cup later this year, bizarrely completely ignoring that De Villiers was never part of any Proteas team that ever won an International Cricket Council trophy, and
c) cheating Bavuma out of the test captaincy by supporting the candidacy of the lethargic, safety-first and uninspiring opener, Dean Elgar at the overripe age of 34.
Helen Zille’s inexhaustible “bantjies vir boeties” accusations towards black people in positions of influence were never as aptly demonstrated and brazenly implemented as in the cadre deployment domain that is the Proteas.
Then, a few months later they have their patronage network rudely disrupted as former players line up to expose institutional racism skillfully interwoven into the Proteas organisational culture. Boucher himself was implicated in serious, perpetual and overt expressions of racist comment and behaviour as part of an untouchable clique. The others are purportedly Smit, Pollock and Kallis – who forcefully usurped even selections authority and brutally subverted the meritorious ascension of many black players into the national squad.
Why did I hope that the Proteas were working on and making progress towards transforming the very racially exclusive fibre of its very existence? Why did I drop my guard, reduce my scepticism and set myself up for a rude awakening? Boucher’s response to these very serious accusations is to shun all responsibility and blame youthful ignorance. His is no different to the refrain adopted by many former white universities in defence of racism – it was meant as innocent student fun by ignorant students who didn’t know better. At my alma mater, Free State University, one student had to abandon his studies due to the severity of the concussion he suffered during initiation and to this day the culprits’ privileged lives have continued, gently insulated from taking any responsibility.
There are at least two insurmountable problems with his defence:
1. How did he become eligible for Proteas selection and then dominated the wicketkeeper position for so many years when he lacked the cultural sensitivity, non-racialism and emotional intelligence to comprehend the peculiarities of the transformation project in the Proteas?
2. While he opines that reconstructing his racism was his employer’s responsibility, he didn’t mind become a multimillionaire during those ignorant years when he enjoyed the awesome privilege of pulling a Protea shirt over his head.
As if his irrational and intellectually insulting conjecture was insufficient, Cricket SA has opted to play the long game to not suspend the coach pending him clearing his name. Why is this grossly inappropriate with a stench of double standards?
To add insult to injury, Ali Bacher the self-appointed don of SA Cricket pours cold water on those who seek to read Boucher the riot act. He tells us Boucher is a nice guy. That’s exactly the problem, the wrong of perpetuated racism is reduced to empty nice guy claims by Bacher. How often have we not heard whites say I’m not racist I have black friends to validate themselves as being nice?
CSA’s new chairperson, Lawson Naidoo, executive secretary of that peculiar selective constitutional watchdog CASAC, is vocal that action against implicated individuals at the Zondo Commission need not wait for the final report. Yet, where he has influence and leads governance, Boucher is allowed – on his watch – to lead the Proteas to Sri Lanka with such a compromising sword hanging over his head. Unless Naidoo wants us to believe that claims of racism do not amount to sufficient grounds to suspend a coach.
Boucher has demonstrated extraordinary arrogance and lacks a sense of gravity to have collectively insulted us all by not offering to step aside pending him answering to the serious allegations against him. Naidoo has not compelled him to do so either.
Transforming cricket remains a deferred project and it’s becoming crystal clear that the incumbent chairperson has the greater appetite to hold the JSC and those implicated at the Zondo commission to account than to assume and discharge real responsibility towards placing urgent space between Boucher and the Proteas.
Our legitimate expectations have been bowled for a duck by this unreconstructed preserver of old-order privilege and instead of using this golden opportunity to clean house and assert a new path. The Proteas brains trust reaffirmed their faith in a coach that oversaw our descent to 6th place on the ICC test and 5th place on the ICC ODI and T20 rankings, while, in rather bizarre and concealed circumstances, they accepted the resignation of assistant coach Enoch Nkwe.
*Arthur Van Nel
Entrepreneur and Sports Follower
