The future arrived at three minutes to three on a dismal January Tuesday afternoon. Mark Nicholas introduced it live. He was at Newlands, where Paarl Royals and Mumbai Indians Cape Town were competing in the inaugural SA20 match.
According to league commissioner Graeme Smith, the ‘T’ was purposefully deleted from ‘T20’ The South Africans anticipated that this would help their league distinguish out from the competition, as there are other leagues of this nature already.
In the United Arab Emirates, the ILT20 begins on Friday with the Dubai Capitals taking against the Abu Dhabi Knight Riders.
Indian Premier League teams have made substantial investments in both tournaments. They possess all six South African teams and three UAE teams. Imagine the new competitions as spinoffs from the CSI television series.
This was the IPL: South Africa season. You also knew since Table Mountain was in the background.
Otherwise, the contest quickly settled into the standard 20-over cricket rhythm. Rashid Khan was present, as he had been for last season’s IPL, Hundred, Caribbean Premier League, Abu Dhabi T10, and this season’s Big Bash, where his club, the Adelaide Strikers, is still attempting to qualify for the playoffs.
The storied South Africa Test team
The same was true for Sam Curran, Jos Buttler, David Miller, and Eoin Morgan. The same players, wearing similar uniforms, playing the same game. In the T20 era, it is always time to throw the coin someplace. It is usually followed by one or more of the typical suspects belting a four off another.
This particular encounter was notable for two reasons: the return of Jofra Archer, who bowled as if he had never been away, and the batting of two South Africans, Ryan Rickelton and Dewald Brevis, in the second innings.
Rickelton is 26 years old and has participated in a few international matches, whilst Brevis is 19 years old and has never played a first-class game. Last year, he played in the Indian and Caribbean Premier Leagues, neither of which have received a great deal of global recognition. They scored 90 superbly as a team, and for those few overs, the competition had a touch of local flavor.
Hence, this was the pinnacle of South Africa’s batting. Whoever was watching their Test squad play was unsure of its whereabouts. In an alternate scenario, Brevis and Rickelton would have been preparing for the first of three one-day matches against Australia in Tasmania this week. However, the South African board withdrew from that series so that its players could participate in this competition.
It is a risk. The team is currently 11th in the World Cup Super League standings (don’t bother trying to keep up with the details of this competition; the ICC, which only launched it in 2020, is scrapping it in 2021), and if they don’t make it into the top eight, they will have to qualify for the 50-over World Cup through another event in the fall.
South Africa Test team may not survive SA20
Herein is the shift. It is not the absence of the letter ‘T’, the changes to the playing conditions that allow captains to change their teams after the toss (neither captain did so), or the innovations in the coverage that left Nicholas with the impossible task of commentating on the opening overs from an armchair somewhere square to the wicket that makes the SA20 unique. It is a fact that South Africa has prioritized the SA20 over Test and one-day cricket, as well as domestic cricket.
South African cricket has reached a critical stage.
Their men’s squad has only 28 Tests scheduled in the upcoming four-year cycle, compared to 38 for India, 40 for Australia, and 43 for England, because the board has almost abandoned scheduling three-Test series.
The franchise teams that have competed in first-class cricket for the past 17 years have been eliminated. And replaced by 15 provincial teams divided into two divisions that will play their matches during the off-season. Dean Elgar and the diminishing group of Test match specialists. Who just suffered a humiliating defeat in Australia, are not scheduled to play another first-class match until the 12th of February.
The board did not have many options. It had been losing so much money for so long that serious action was required. South Africa is the third-oldest Test nation, having played the game for over 130 years. And its domestic competition, the Currie Cup, was formerly one of the world’s strongest.
However, the game grew untenable. From now on, everything in South African cricket will revolve around their ability to win the SA20. No one in the room even appears to be pretending otherwise. There is at least an element of sincerity about it.
The game is evolving in ways that will be problematic for everyone. This winter, several England’s young players declined the option to go on a development trip with the Lions to Sri Lanka because they had contracts with South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. South Africa has opted to attempt to get ahead of the situation.
It is hoped that the cash generated by the SA20 will pay for the revitalization of their first-class cricket. Allowing the Test team to eventually develop. If they are still playing that sport’s format by the time they are ready, that is.
