CricketZA

Cricket South Africa announced sweeping new measures for the 2020-21 cricket season, ostensibly to cut costs spent on domestic cricket. The biggest change will see the First Class and One Day Cups adopt a rather strange format where there will now be two groups of three teams, instead of the old round-robin format. Having seen how unpopular the Conference system proved to be in Super Rugby, CSA has decided that it would serve as the ideal format for their restructured domestic system. Essentially, each team plays the teams in their conference or group twice, once at home and once away. Then they face the team in the opposing conference one. Presumably, the home/away will alternate every year, for cross-conference matchups. One advantage this system has over the Super Rugby equivalent is that teams will still face each team in the competition. Largely due to the fact there are so few teams in the domestic set-up. Another advantage is that with the conferences likely to be set accord...

“It’s a sorry state of affairs when attempts are made to silence respected journalists for writing about the ongoing problems in the game,” said SACA chief executive, Tony Irish.  “This is not however dissimilar to what SACA has had to endure over the last nine months, during which we have been barred from CSA sub-committees, denied access to critical information necessary for us to represent the players and had our agreements breached with impunity.” At SACA’s annual general meeting of players in November it was specifically mandated by the players to re-affirm its concerns relating to the financial position, the domestic restructure, the CSA/SACA relationship, the Proteas (men) team structures, the financial aspects of the MSL and CSA’s refusal to engage SACA to resolve these issues.  In response to SACA letters taking these up, CSA has however persisted in its refusal to address any of the concerns and instead has stated that they are ‘sub-judice’ under the current High C...