Reduced fixtures a no-ball for the domestic game

IN last week’s statement, Cricket South Africa (CSA) said that they were “excited” to announce the domestic fixtures for the coming 2024/25 season, which gets under way next month.

However, it’s hard to get ‘excited’ when the amount of domestic cricket is being reduced.

The CSA T20 Challenge will only have only one round of fixtures of seven games, before four play-off games are played, including the final.

This was a massive, yet welcome change from last season’s two rounds of games and a final, which made the tournament dull, to say the least.

With the T20 fixtures reduced, one would have expected a considerable increase in the number of Four-Day Series fixtures, a format that CSA really needed to prove that they value.

Disappointingly, CSA announced that the Four-Day competition will remain as it was last season ‒ seven round-robin games and a final between the top two teams. The issue is that seven games is just not enough to produce players who will be fit for Test cricket, the toughest format of the game.

It becomes more of a concern when one considers that the UK’s domestic teams, for example, play twice as much red-ball cricket in a season, which makes them more likely to produce cricketers ripe for Tests.

CSA director of cricket Enoch Nkwe said that the budget is just not enough to schedule the number of games the system needs to give players the best chance of success when they graduate to international cricket. With all three formats without title sponsors, CSA are the sole sponsors of the three competitions and Nkwe says that this has played a role in the decision.

“Look, the reality is that it’s quite expensive to host a cricket match,” said Nkwe. “Unfortunately, we are not working with a big budget when it comes to the domestic side of things.

“In our engagements with the CEOs (of the domestic unions), we collectively reached an agreement that for the season we’re going to look to cut down the number of fixtures and try and invest a little more on the product.

“We are hoping we can find competition sponsors for all three formats of domestic cricket and that will help us immensely in trying to increase the number of matches.

“At the moment, all the money is being coughed by the CSA office and we still need to take care of the SA ‘A’ to try and close the gap between domestic cricket and international cricket.”

In the recent past, CSA had emphasised their aim to resurrect the SA ‘A’ project. As a result, the SA ‘A’ side toured Sri Lanka last year for a multi-format tour before they hosted West Indies ‘A’ and India ‘A’ last summer, series that gave fringe players valuable international experience.

The project was set to continue this month with CSA having announced that the side would tour the West Indies with the Proteas. However, the ‘A’ tour has since been postponed due to financial reasons.

“The SA ‘A’ team was supposed to go to the West Indies ... Unfortunately, we’ve had to postpone due to costs but we are negotiating with West Indies to see when we can reschedule during this current season,” said Nkwe.

“In the future, we are looking to increase SA ‘A’ content in support of the Proteas.”

Nkwe and CSA were able to confirm a multi-format inbound SA ‘A’ tour against Sri Lanka ‘A’ from August 31 to September 18.