The Route to the Top is changing
Temperament counts more than Technique...?
Neil Manthorp
Australia and India are the only remaining Test playing nations which use their mainstream domestic competitions as the primary gateway to international cricket. The others have gravitated towards under-19 and ‘A’ Team cricket as a far more accurate and reliable guide to young players’ potential to perform at a higher level.
The secondary yardstick for promotion is rapidly becoming their performances in their country’s franchise leagues which all have, to a greater or lesser degree, an international contingent of players and routinely enjoy the largest ‘profile’ in those countries apart from full international cricket.
More and more young players are being identified at school or junior age-group level and are being fast-tracked into junior international competition or ‘A’ team matches and largely bypassing the conventional route to national selection. They are not in the majority yet, but may well become so as domestic cricket becomes more and more marginalised.
Every country in the world – apart from India and Australia – plays less first-class cricket than ever before. Cricket ‘logic’ stands less of a chance against financial pragmatism today than it ever did. Whereas cricketers were once required to score regular runs against provinces, states or counties, often for many years and preferably painstakingly to be considered for Test cricket, these days they are judged as much on temperament as technique.
One of the effects of the SA20 may be to highlight the writing which many believe is indelibly written on the wall for many of the country’s professional cricketers. Their future is bleak. Only around 75 of the country’s 220 or so men’s cricketers are involved in the SA20 leaving the majority kicking their heels for six weeks at the height of summer.
Six of the eight Division One teams have their facilities requisitioned two weeks before the start of the tournament while the majority of their coaches are attached to the SA IPL franchises leaving the majority of players without access to either facilities or expertise. It’s not just a cricket issue, it’s a wellness issue.
Many dozens of cricketers have faced a prolonged period of time feeling unwanted and unappreciated – like failures in pursuit of their dream career. Many probably aren’t good enough, or perhaps they’re just unsuited to the format. But there are also a fair few who will have needed some TLC for the last month or so.
‘Idleness breeds vice’ – that’s not always true but it’s a common problem amongst young sportsmen and women across many codes. The SA Cricketers Association employs half a dozen Personal Development Managers (PDMs) to act as advisors, mentors and sounding boards for all the country’s professionals.
They have been busy dispensing wise and important advice, very much behind the scenes of the dazzling stage on which the SA20 has been played. They have encouraged those left behind to ‘proactively use your time to improve some aspect of your career and have something ‘material’ to show for it afterwards.’
Other themes have been ‘…reflect and recalibrate where your career is at, invest in personal development and mental wellbeing. Recharge physically and emotionally and invest time in personal relationships with partners and family, people you may neglect when you are playing regularly.
‘Revisit your finances (the vast disparity in SA20 salaries also causes unhappiness and resentment – as it does in all franchise leagues) and, by achieving a personal goal, physical, financial or emotional, you may feel that your ‘time out’ was a good thing. There is, of course, advice of the plainer-speaking variety: ‘Don’t drink too much, don’t play too much golf and… don’t spend hours (or days) on your Play Sation.
But a favourite piece of sanguine sageness which has been used by the PDMs this past month is: ‘Don’t waste a crisis.’ It is an earthy attempt to take a positive outlook on the situation while accepting the unvarnished truth about how it feels to have failed the audition and have no part in SA cricket’s ‘greatest show.’ And it has been a great show culminating this week in the knockout matches and the grand final at the Wanderers.
Counselling and consoling are short term solutions. The mid-term answer is to have less professional cricketers with less false hopes and unrealistic ambitions. It means having less professional teams which would save CSA hundreds of millions of Rands in annual handouts and make the path into a professional team harder, which would make them stronger. Maybe even strong enough to regain their status as feeders to the Proteas.