"Imagine an Elite School in a Township..."

"I'm very grateful but it still makes me shudder..."

Continuing my conversation with former Lions cricketer Nono Pongolo: (Please read the introduction to the previous column if you haven’t already done so!)

“Winning trophies and competitions is a by-product of creating the right, competitive but supportive atmosphere within a squad. If a coach’s only goal is to win the next match then it’s hard to give young players an opportunity in big matches.

“There is so much less cricket being played in Langa than when I was there 25 years ago. The infrastructure has degraded and there’s no money to refurbish and maintain it. That should be the government’s responsibility. They want Cricket South Africa to produce more black players but they do nothing to provide opportunities at grassroots level.

“You can’t expect CSA to build the entire pyramid. Kids just need to have the opportunity to play cricket at a young age, to be introduced to the game. We have so much talent out there but we’re barely scratching the surface,” Pongolo said.

By far the most common route for black cricketers from rural or former township areas into club, provincial and eventually international cricket is through scholarships to elite, cricket-playing schools. It is a route that Pongolo took when he was awarded a place at Cape Town’s most elite private school, Diocesan College (Bishops).

“I’m very grateful for the opportunity I was given and obviously I would never have played first-class cricket without it. My only reservation is that it just feels so ‘random’. Can we really back ourselves to identify the best young players at the age of 13? And it’s such a tiny minority who are given that chance – we must create more opportunities for more kids to play with decent facilities through their school years,” Pongolo said.

Lungi Ngidi has spoken about the extreme difficulties he had adapting to the illustrious surroundings of Hilton College when he, too, was identified as a rare talent at the age of 13 and awarded a Scholarship. It is something with which Pongolo strongly identifies: “I honestly don’t know how I got through my first year, it was absolutely terrifying. To move from Thembani Primary School in Langa, to Bishops, almost overnight with just a few words of English…it still makes me shudder.

“I didn’t realise that there kind people buying me things when we went to the Tuck Shop, I was completely out of my depth. There is nothing wrong with the Scholarship or Bursary system but it’s not going to solve the problem, is it? I was one of the lucky few but that’s the issue, it’s just a few. There are plenty of young kids who can’t cope and don’t last when they are given an opportunity like that, but we don’t hear too much about them. It costs R350k a year at Hilton, a massive investment on a handful of boys, some of whom won’t make it. It’s probably not financially sustainable and it’s not going to produce the numbers of provincial or international cricketers to sustain the diversity that cricket needs and wants.

“Imagine if we had a school with facilities like that actually in a township, where boys and girls could play sport with top coaches and still live at home. I think that is (Springbok captain) Siya Kolisi’s dream, to build a school which could give opportunities to hundreds of kids rather than just a few lucky ones who were spotted at the right time and place. That would be real change,” Pongolo said, aware of the enormity of the dream.

“At the moment the country’s state school teachers are losing their jobs and the ones that remain are overwhelmed by their workloads and they don’t have time to coach, even if they are qualified. With so few young players being properly introduced to the game at grassroots level we are never going to have racially representative teams ‘naturally’, without targets.

“There are many good NGOs and some private coaching programmes and academies but they should be supplementing the work which should be funded by government.

“The days of coaches ‘hiding’ behind tick-boxes are mostly over, hopefully. CSA have introduced their ‘quality of opportunity’ measurements to ensure that top order batters bat in the top six and bowlers are used where they are normally used at age group level. We have all seen specialist Black batters batting at seven in teams, it looks horrible and it does nothing for them or the team, apart from ticking a box. It’s horrible and is an abuse of the intention of targets,” said Pongolo.

What about implementing a system of ‘incentivisation’ rather than ‘required targets’ which is, of course, a contradiction in terms anyway. Are they ‘targets’ or ‘requirements’?

“It feels like a positive way to approach the issue because, at the moment, there is so much negativity around it. If a system like that had been in place for the last decade then Border and the Dolphins would be the richest franchises in the country. But almost all of the black players leave Border and many leave the Dolphins because there are some teams who just rely on buying players rather than developing them,” Pongolo said. “It would certainly expose the provinces which do not have a good development pipeline.”

“There are many questions: Who pays, and how much? Would it lead to franchises ‘hoarding’ their players until they get paid and therefore stifling the free market? But incentivising provinces would certainly focus the minds of those who aren’t producing their own black players. You would probably have to give all the teams a 3-5 year notice about the new system and keep targets in place for that period before it kicks in,” Pongolo said.