Someone Dropped the Ball (again)
The Warriors debacle is a low point
Fidel Edwards, Jimmy Anderson, Mushfiqur Rahim, Vernon Philander, Glenn McGrath... This is a small list of cricketers who have once missed out on matches after they were injured playing football in a warm-up. On April 10, 2005, Ashraf Mall joined that list.
People of a certain vintage will remember this story well. It was told a few times after it happened. If you are not familiar with it, here is what happened:
Gauteng's Highveld Lions were 'hosting' the Goodyear Eagles (now Knights) at Sedgars Park (now JB Marks Oval). Modern fans will find it hard to understand, but once upon a time, Sedgars Park was the Lions' home venue*.
Shukri Conrad, the then Lions coach, deployed his 13-member squad onto the field for a warm-up. The team had four black players: Garnett Kruger, Enoch Nkwe, Eugene Moleon, and Ashraf Mall. The quartet didn't just help the Lions meet their transformation target, they were good cricketers.
About 30 minutes before the start of the match, Mall was struck in the face by the ball and broke his sunglasses. His eyelid was cut, the bleeding seemed to take forever to stop, and he could not see adequately to take his place in the team.
That left Conrad in an impossible position. The Lions' team didn't have more players of colour at Sedgars Park. He couldn’t field his 12th and 13th players because they were white. Doing so would mean Lions missed their transformation target and opened themselves up to punishment.
Conrad felt that this matter was above his pay grade, so he reached out to his boss, the then Gauteng president, Cricket South Africa director and executive committee member, Barry Skjoldhammer. Conrad didn't get help. Skjoldhammer didn't know what to do either. He reached out to people whom he felt knew best without any success.
Thandisizwe Andrew Bula was an Eastern Cape boy plying his trade in Potchefstroom, turning out for North West. He was a decent wicketkeeper, an okay batter and could roll his arm. He had a wonderful relationship with Shukri Conrad. On 10 April, 2005, he was Conrad’s saviour.
The scheduled time of play was drawing closer and neither Conrad nor Skjoldhammer had come up with a solution when the coach received a text from Bula. He was at the ground, hoping to score complimentary tickets, and wondered if Conrad could sort him out.
"Forget about the tickets, son. You won't be watching from the stands today. You are playing. What's your shirt size?" This is what I imagine Conrad to have said to Bula in reply. Whatever it was, he got Bula to pad up for the Lions. He didn't keep wicket, neither did he bowl. He came in at number ten and was dismissed for a two-ball duck.
And just like that, Bula played his only match for the Lions, made his T20 debut, while Conrad ticked the required boxes.
I will save you, dear reader, from a treatise on how Black African cricketers were used to tick boxes during the noughties and into the early 2010s. I won’t spoil your day with the recollections of humiliation players of colour suffered because they were regarded as interlopers.
I will also save you from winded explanations about how the pipeline has not improved much since the ‘Bula incident’. I won’t go into detail about how, 20 years after Conrad was put in a corner by policies that weren’t supported by proper structures, modern coaches are not in such a different position.
What I will touch on is that the Bula incident left a bad taste in the mouths of all parties involved. No coach should find themselves in a position where they have to ‘make a plan’ to tick policy boxes, and no player should find themselves in a situation where they take to the field to make up the numbers. It’s unfair on both.
“Tick box systems are hindering the growth and success of our cricket at grassroots level. The death or crippling of any grassroot structure may not be felt immediately but, eventually it is felt and its effects last long,” a friend who works coaches at grassroots level told me recently.
He shared this while we were discussing girls’ cricket. It’s weird how his assessment is also relevant to transformation targets. While the policy might help more players of colour take to the field, are there structures in place to ensure that the targets can be done away with at some point? 20 years is a long time to see little to no progress.
Someone dropped the ball. I don’t think that someone is the Warriors’ head coach and his team.
*Gauteng and North West merged to form the Highveld Lions for the Supersport Series.