South Africa is heading Zimbabwe’s way and there’s no stopping it

I’m commenting a week later but with good reason.. Yesterday the entire CSA board has resigned.. It’s a first step.. The depoliticization of the board is essential..social justice particularly race issues given our past will be on the landscape for some time yet, but in pursuing so called transformation it is critical that teams keep winning.. Rugby the most hated sport in SA for so long has become its most loved.. What they have been able to to is keep winning whilst sensibly introducing change and proved that transformation and excellence can Co exist.. Cricket has done the exact opposite and the risk is very real of a disintegration of SA as a cricketing power.

I just can't get excited about T20. If it's on tv I'll watch it because it's leather on willow but I'd never go to a game. To me it will never be anything more than glorified continuous cricket.

In the meantime 5 t20s vs NZ for Australia in NZ to look forward too. Unfortunately none at Seddon Park my home ground.

But SA will be in the prime Boxing Day & New Years Test slot.

Be five years next March. Yeah would be a good series, but our board is even deprioritising South Africa now, and when they come here next, presumably two years from now on account of the Ashes next year, it will have been 6 years since they were here for tests rather than the usual 4.

Quite depressing indeed considering New Zealand has one of the better test sides at the moment. We are starting to become quite formidable at home. Except we haven't played Australia at home in a long time.

Yeah, I was just having a convo with a fb friend earlier today and the fact is that test series here in Australia v India as well as home and away Ashes series pretty much paper over the cracks in terms of popularity. Even fanatical Indian fans prolly only give a damn about tests v Australia, and among Aussies, only fanatics like myself and the aforementioned fb friend, and of course other roarers here care about test cricket as a whole rather than just the 2 or 3 top countries, and most of us were born no later than about 1980. It’s quite depressing really.

Yeah, I can’t comment on your neck of the woods, but these are some of my experiences over four years teaching in Moree early 2012 to late 2015: • Caucasian PE teachers from the school I was at who were involved in weekend junior rubgy league, as well as school teams, were adamant, hand over heart, that there were plenty of Caucasian parents who admitted openly that they did not want their own children playing sport with ‘black kids’. • I coached the junior school cricket team (Years 7-9) and I was desperate to harness and develop the talent among the Aboriginal students, some 40% of all students to some degree or other. I remember one time I organised a friendly (non-schools competition) match against Goondiwindi High just 120 odd km up the road. Some of the Aboriginal kids were having trouble coming up with the bus fare, and since it was the school bus we were hiring, I went to the principal to see if we could get it cheaper to subsidise some of these Aboriginal kids, and Clontarf was helpful too. However, somehow it leaked out and the parents of the non-aboriginal kids kicked up an enormous stink completely devoid of perspective and their ignorant kids grumbled openly “Why should we have to pay when they don’t?!” This was moronic because firstly it wasn’t all the aboriginal kids, but some of them were living in extremely broken homes in absolute squalor, and secondly the non-aboriginal kids were not being asked to pay more than they normally would have, and thirdly it was none of their God damned business any more than any kid of any ethnic background getting a scholarship to an expensive private school. So, we ended up going up to that game three players short and it made all the difference, and I never told those snooty kids that the trip would have fallen through completely if I had not forked out the difference from my own pocket. • In my 4th, and what turned out to be my final year at the school before I finally got a transfer to closer to home, we were finally making progress and we won our first ever official schools game in round 1, but then in round two, the mother of a partial aboriginal kid who couldn’t quite make the playing 12 just happened to be the indigenous attendance officer at the school. In our final training session before round 2 game, the very afternoon before the game, she marches up to us and announces that one of our star bowlers and brilliant fielder, a boy called Adrian Smith, couldn’t play because his attendance wasn’t high enough. This card would never have been pulled if it had been rugby league and she should have appreciated better than others how some of the indigenous kids would have little or no way of getting to the local doctor just to get a medical certificate when away from school for extended sick periods. For lots of those indigenous kids, it was a massive win for them just to walk through that school gate at 8.30 on any given morning and to then remain there until the final bell at 3.20. • We lost that 2nd game, understandably, as that afore described incident had a massively detrimental effect on team morale, just when the non-indigenous kids were learning to bury their prejudices for the sake of the team going forward. However, we did unearth what we had been lacking the previous three years i.e. a batsman of immense talent – there was never any dearth of fast bowling talent among the indigenous kids. This Year 7 kid called Mark Pegus wanted to take up junior cricket of a weekend that summer and I approached his mother, a single mother doing it tough, and she apologetically told me she spent so much time running around after him for the sake of his football during the winter, that it just wouldn’t be possible. I would hazard a guess that none of the non-indigenous kids’ parents would make an effort to do a tiny act of charity and pick him up and drop him off, like it used to be for junior cricket on a Saturday for my brother and I back in the 1980s when the father on the neighbouring farm used to pick us up on his way through with his own sons, as our own father wasn’t into cricket but he was happy for us to attend. • Nothing can change the fact that rugby league is the biggest sport for just about any aboriginal kid in a small town or city, but there surely must be some who could go much further with their cricket if given the right encouragement and properly steering by a caring mentor. I mean I think AB de Villiers would have preferred a career in hockey, Curtly Ambrose had his heart on being a professional basket ball player and Steve Waugh’s first love until the end of high school was soccer, and yet they all had the right people in the right place at the right time to steer them in the right direction. It doesn’t have to be every aboriginal kid in every town, but just one or two here and there would be enough and it wouldn’t have to compromise their rubgy league one little bit.

Those franchises I mentioned also play a odi season every year called the ford trophy and a domestic test season (3 dayers). Hardly any crowd turns up to watch the domestic tests or international tests in New Zealand. Except on boxing day. T20 and Odis get the best crowds.

I don’t for a moment doubt the premise in your first sentence, but that’s not where I was coming from. Those franchises you mention, are they T20 teams or the teams in your domestic first class comp, i.e. your equivalent of our Sheffield Shield? If it’s the former, then my own premise is where is the financial incentive for players in New Zealand to aspire to first class and test cricket when all the money is in T20? The Australian team doesn’t get too many months off most years, and then there are some such as Cummins and Smith who also play IPL.

Pretty difficult for New Zealand with a population of only 5 million where rugby is the number one sport. Domestically to be compared to the IPL or the BBL. The up and coming players do have a career in cricket. New Zealand has 5 franchises Auckland Aces, Northern Knights, Central Stags, Wellington Firebirds, Canterbury Kings and Otago Volts. The majority of players play cricket from October through to April. I am wondering how many of the players in Australia play cricket for the entire year?

Tamworth area.

Whereabouts are you Bob?

There are 4 or 5 Koori people running around in my local bush league but I can tell you for a fact that all of them are just filling in time until the footy season. Rugby League is by far and away the most popular sport amongst my local Aboriginal community. The guys that play cricket like the game but they love their footy first and foremost. It's a shame because there's some really good talent there but it just seems to be the way it is.

Again, if you are using Russia as a source of truth, that’s not helping your credibility. It’s certainly not the case that Australia‘s foreifn policy thinks that there is any white genocide happening. Australia takes Saffa farmers because we need their skills and they fit the relevant skilled visa category - they aren’t being admitted as refugees. You’ve also made the comment about legislation twice now and it spectacularly misses the point. The systemic racism isn’t this one case. It’s every single other one where the police aren’t charged and the system doesn’t respond.

That’s the result of white privilege keeping black people down trodden economically, whether this comes under the strict definition of systemic or not. Slavery officially ended in 1865, but it didn’t ensure equality for black people in the south, and still hasn’t to this day, irrespective of fancy looking laws that supposedly guarantee it. A good movie I watched a couple of weeks ago called ‘A Time to Kill’ portrays this reality very well.

Police brutality towards black suspects for starters ...