The cricket season is hardly under way and already you can sense the growing appetite for the third edition of the SA20 in January. It’s a remarkable tournament, full of fun, sixes and overseas stars, and when you wake up the next morning you don’t remember a thing. It is perfectly suited to the modern blurring of sport and entertainment.
From an administrative and financial point of view, the SA20 ticks all the boxes. Last year’s tournament posted a profit of, depending on whom you get your figures from, R54m (Cricket South Africa, CSA) or about R50m (the South African Cricketers’ Association, Saca). It’s healthy green, however you skin it.
More important, though, for Saca CEO Andrew Breetzke is that the tournament doesn’t cost CSA a cent. “CSA declared a dividend in the first year, which was fantastic,” Breetzke says. “That’s after posting losses of about R200m per tournament with the ill-starred GlobalT20 and the Mzansi Super League, neither of which got off the ground.”
The SA20 got airborne from season one, and at a time when CSA was struggling to re-establish its standing after years of infighting and kerfuffle. Breetzke says it’s the second-best tournament of its kind after the Indian Premier League (IPL), leapfrogging Australia’s Big Bash because it’s in a better time zone for TV in England, Europe and the subcontinent.
“We’ve got the added advantage of taking place after Christmas, when the weather in England is lousy. What better way to spend your winter as a player or fan than to pop onto a plane and come and spend your pounds here in a sunnier environment?”
The English influence on the tournament, which starts on January 9, is strong. World Cup-winning all-rounder Ben Stokes will join MI Cape Town, with his England teammate Joe Root set to go up the road to the Paarl Royals. Harry Brook, scorer of a triple-century for England against Pakistan recently, was set to join the Joburg Super Kings, but was advised to withdraw because of workload pressures.
Breetzke says the SA20 has been a financial saviour for South African cricket. He makes a comparison with New Zealand, which doesn’t have a T20 international tournament and battles to keep its players centrally contracted.
“Hybrid contracts are becoming the thing for them,” he says. “Look at a player like Kane Williamson. Given his age [34], he wants to maximise his earning potential as a free agent in T20 leagues around the world. Many of New Zealand’s best players are looking to do that. Despite the Kiwis’ competitiveness internationally, they don’t have the bank balance to keep all of their players interested all of the time.”
Truth be told, South Africa isn’t far from the New Zealand scenario. Tabraiz Shamsi has turned his back on CSA to give himself more freedom as a T20 privateer. “I have decided to opt out of my central contract to give myself more flexibility in the domestic season,” said Shamsi, who is known as “The Magician”.
Fair enough, but is Shamsi in or out? He says he’s available for national selection but wants to be treated differently from players whose salaries are paid by CSA. He wants to be free to pick and choose in the international candy store as he sees fit.
This is the problem at the heart of T20 cricket — no-one knows what it is worth as a cricket product, rather than a financial one. Once there was domestic cricket and international cricket, the first being a stepping stone to the second. Now you have domestic cricket, sort of international cricket (like the SA20) and international cricket. It’s sometimes difficult to understand what the people running the game see as cricket’s soul, what is sacrosanct, and what is mere frippery.
Is cricket’s soul a hyperactive tournament with attention deficit disorder like the SA20? Or is it the far slower — some would say boring — charms of Test cricket, which doesn’t generate nearly as much moolah through the sale of broadcast rights?
Might it be both? Nobody seems to know, though CSA has consistently undervalued the Test game in the past couple of years by playing two-Test series, like the one now on in Bangladesh. At the beginning of the year CSA sent an understrength Test side to New Zealand, while the SA20 was galloping along, which tends to suggest that it knows the answer.
In the meantime the SA20 is good fun, there’s no denying that. Tickets are selling out fast, which suggests that you and other fans know that too.
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