In June, Proteas cricket captain Temba Bavuma will lead his team onto the hallowed turf of Lord’s. “Hallowed turf” is a cricket cliché, but like all clichés, it contains a grain of truth.
James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, wrote of Dublin that it was “a new and complex sensation”. Lord’s is like that. It is an experience, a sensation. It is packed with more history than a Sotheby’s catalogue.
Its museum contains the finest collection of cricket art in the world. The field itself slopes down through the playing square on the one side and towards the square boundaries on the other. Playing there, in front of an urbane, cricket-loving crowd, will be a career thrill.
Yet there’s a snag. Late last month Cricket South Africa (CSA) released the Proteas programme for 2025/2026. There is no provision made for even a single home Test.
This means at least three things worth discussing. First, Bavuma’s Proteas might beat Australia at Lord’s in June when the two teams contest the third World Test Championship (WTC) final.
If this transpires, they will be the WTC champions. Yes, the opposite might happen. They might lose to Australia, which, frankly, is the more likely result, but they might also prevail against Steve Smith, Travis Head and Nathan Lyon et al.
But if they win, as things stand, CSA, in its astonishing wisdom, has given the Proteas no opportunity in the next 18 months to defend their crown.
Second, it means no Tests in mid-December in Centurion, no Boxing Day Test anywhere, and no New Year’s Test at Newlands. The New Year’s Test is to South African cricket what the summer southeaster is to the Cape — built into the very fabric of the place.
Two years ago, India played a Test at Newlands. The pitch was ropey, the ground was shabby, and it was all over in two days. Last year there was a fabulous Test against Pakistan at Newlands, in which Ryan Rickelton scored an accomplished double hundred. Newlands was beginning to look like its old self again. Now it will have no Test inventory for 2025/206.
Third, in announcing that the next edition of the SA20 (the local equivalent of the Indian Premier League, or IPL) will take place earlier than usual next season, CSA was not specific about when it will actually start, which seems like a deliberate omission.
The SA20 will start, for your information, on December 26, on Boxing Day, the very Boxing Day lovers of Test cricket, the highest form of the game, believed was sacrosanct.
Which brings us to CSA’s press release. In time-honoured fashion, the release detailed what international cricket at home is on offer in 2025/2026; it didn’t linger on what isn’t on offer.
What is on offer are two home series for the women against Ireland and Pakistan. The release only gets to the men’s programme in the fourth paragraph, which tends to suggest that women’s cricket is the more important of the two.
Can we really compare a white-ball series against the women of Ireland with what should be a decent forward programme for a Test team who could potentially become the champions of the world?
Two seasons ago, CSA bungled its diaries and sent a second-string Proteas to New Zealand for a two-Test series. Despite losing the series, the Proteas, under Bavuma and coach Shukri Conrad, managed a splendid conjuring trick over the months to follow.
With victories over the West Indies (away) and Bangladesh (away), reinforced by home series wins against Sri Lanka and Pakistan, they managed to crawl up the WTC table far enough to be able to contest June’s WTC final.
We were told after the egg-on-the-face moment over the New Zealand debacle that such double-booking wouldn’t happen again. Despite benefiting from the mistake because it kept South Africa’s best players at home for the SA20, Graeme Smith, the face of the SA20, was critical of the situation.
Same old story
Now, a similar thing has happened. We are being sold a white-ball series against Ireland’s women in place of five days of hard and attritional men’s cricket against England, say.
“We are looking forward to seeing our women take on Ireland and Pakistan. These tours provide our team with strong competition but also give our fans an opportunity to watch the Proteas women compete at their favourite venues across the country,” said CSA CEO Pholetsi Moseki.
“Our international window for men’s cricket is unusually shorter next season due to outbound bilateral tours to Australia, England, Pakistan and India between August and December.”
Note, Moseki doesn’t mention Test cricket here. He mentions “bilateral tours”, which are, in this case, white-ball tours. They are all played away, they earn CSA no broadcast rights revenue, and they will be quickly forgotten. To compare them implicitly to Test cricket is to be disingenuous.
World cricket is in a terrible muddle at the moment, and scheduling is part of the problem. The International Cricket Council (ICC) organises one major international tournament a year, more than what used to be the case.
World cricket is in a terrible muddle at the moment, and scheduling is part of the problem
The IPL, meanwhile, blocks off two months of the calendar in which no other international cricket is played. This means a shrinking window for when Test cricket might be scheduled.
The forward programme for ICC nations used to be managed differently. There used to be something called the Future Tours Programme (FTP). Each FTP cycle lasted four years and ensured that participating teams played each other at least twice (one home, one away) in every cycle.
But the FTP has been dispensed with. It is now incumbent on national boards to negotiate their own bilateral series within the context of this shrinking window.
“It is a tough, quick-moving scheduling environment,” says a big-province CEO, “because there’s less and less time for things like Test cricket. This said, CSA hasn’t planned properly. The one advantage of playing in the WTC final is that if we win it and play no Test cricket afterwards, we’ll be champions for far longer.”
With the muddle being what it is, it is imperative that home boards think about the game and its changing financial, scheduling and contractual status wisely. CSA seems incapable of doing this. Having potential world champions playing no cricket in the format in which they’ve become world champions is a world champion disaster.
Being in a muddle doesn’t inspire confidence, either of the hard or soft kind. One example of hard confidence might be sponsorship, and it is important to know that the Proteas are a team without a headline sponsor, though Suzuki is rumoured to be waiting in the wings.
Soft confidence is different. It has to do with accountability, with how fans see the association; it has to do with issues of trust and strategic vision. Given the lack of Test cricket next season, one can only conclude that CSA is muddling through the muddle.
Ironies abound. At exactly this time of the year — over Easter — in 1994, the Proteas, under Kepler Wessels, played in the first readmission Test in 21 years. The venue was Bridgetown, Barbados, significant because the West Indies had been at the forefront of the movement to exclude South Africa from international cricket because of apartheid.
Now, 31 years later, we are in a similar position as we were during isolation: we’re playing no Test cricket in the coming season. This time, it’s slightly different because it’s a self-inflicted, voluntary isolation. But the consequences are the same.
Second irony. The Proteas players, from Kagiso Rabada to Aiden Markram, love playing Test cricket and have said so on many occasions. They hold the Test game in the highest esteem. They probably don’t hold it in such high esteem that they’d compromise their lucrative T20 careers for it, but to ask them to do so is probably unfair.
As potential world Test champions they need the backing of their association. And this means finding a place in world cricket’s congested forward programme for them to show their fans at home how good they are.
They are a side who raise doubts, particularly in their batting, but they might just be very good indeed.
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