It’s not soccer, but South Africa might like it
Cricket will never supplant soccer as the preferred sport of the South African majority but like never before it has a priceless opportunity to enter the consciousness of the Rainbow Nation
Peter English
25-Feb-2013
Cricket will never supplant soccer as the preferred sport of the South African majority but like never before it has a priceless opportunity to enter the consciousness of the Rainbow Nation. And remain there. So says Mike Coward in the Australian as he worries about the country’s lack of Test culture.
South Africa has played Test cricket since 1889, was, with England and Australia, a foundation member of the then Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909 and its black and coloured communities of the Western Cape have a rich but largely unknown cricket history spanning more than a century. For all this, only occasionally does cricket engage across the numerous divides of one of the most complex, compartmentalised and politicised societies on Earth.
Robert Craddock, writing in Daily Telegraph, looks at the rise and potential fall of Twenty20.
The first casualty of recession is often gratuitous glitz and glamour and that is how it has proved in cricket's newest form of the game. Twenty20 cricket is not going to die - but it is going to have its wings clipped. It may have to survive on its product as much as its rowdy bells and whistles.
Peter English is former Australasia editor of ESPNcricinfo