It's Not Initially A Black Tragedy

As the cricket fanatic that I am, I tend to go through my old magazines and cricket articles. I’ve managed to stock up all my magazines I bought and interested me since 2008, when I started taking my cricket extremely seriously.

On my recent recapitulation on my magazines, I bumped into a Tom Eaton article that he wrote for the Business Day Sport back in July 2009 labelled Black Tragic. This article was indeed very moving as its name shows; yet the article I felt was very unjustified. Eaton truly angers me personally as an aspirating black cricketer by stating that he’s not satisfied to hear that black cricketers are complaining and saying that they are not better represented by Cricket South Africa (CSA) as they are very few black amateurs/professional coaches in South Africa.

Unfortunately this is definitely correct. Our black players are really not being properly represented by CSA and their respected white coaches. Here’s a good example. Geoffrey Toyana was recently employed head coach of the Highveld Lions squad and immediately signed young promising batsman, Grant Mokoena.

Not that the Highveld Lions didn’t have any quality black cricketers in their team, as they already had 22 year old batsman, Temba Bavuma, South African Wicket-keeper batsman, Thami Tsolekile and off-spinner, Aaron Phangiso. My only concern is that why did they have to wait for a black coach to be employed in order for true transformation to really take place. Tsolekile and Phangiso are black cricketers, yes I agree, but they not initially from the Gauteng Lions Union. They never represented Gauteng or North West in Nuffield Week/Khaya Majola Week back when they were still U/19 cricketers. But Mokoena did - He was truly a transformation black cricketer. 

“Five determined but mediocre batsmen. Don’t tell me those are racist coaches. This isn’t a racist conspiracy. This is a demographical crisis.” Writes Eaton about five black batsmen he mentions in his article. Khaya Zondo, Loots Bosman, Enoch Nkwe, Tumelo Bodibe and Mpho Sekhoto are the batsmen he mentions.

Last season in the domestic CSA 50-overs limited competition, young wicket-keeper batsman, Mangi Mosehle, featured in some of the games as a wicket-keeper batsman, or just as a batsman when Heino Kuhn, the other wicket-keeper batsman in the side also featured in the same starting 11. A wicket-keeper batsman batting down at number nine, is this fair? After all, it’s his batting abilities that have granted him a Titans contract. What’s even more ‘mediocre’ is that when Heino Kuhn seemed to be struggling with form with opening the batting, they kept shuffling him to batting positions of three, four and six, while Mosehle was pushed in the deep end of the pool and told to open the batting. Something he’s never done in his amateur/professional cricket career before. When he doesn’t perform at the top of the order he simply gets dropped with no questions asked.

So we go back to our argument, is CSA as well as the white coaches really representing our black players? Or are they just there simply to fill up the required ‘quota numbers’ a team should have on the field?

-Mandilulame Manjezi
@JizzyJakes