No room for backbone

South Africa's cricketers were probably contemplating their increased earning potential and a healthy relationship with Cricket South Africa (CSA) when their groundbreaking memorandum of understanding was unveiled a month ago. But the last week has been a traumatic one, with the players feeling that the board has turned on them.

It all came to a head with Jacques Kallis's exclusion from the squad for the Twenty20 World Championship, which South Africa's premier cricketer has taken as a slight on his ability - not forgetting the wad of money (about R280,000, or £19,000) he will lose out on by not playing in the tournament.

And now his fellow senior pro, Mark Boucher, stands to lose a healthy amount of his own hard-earned for speaking out in favour of his colleague. "He's the best allrounder we've ever had and he's saved more games than anyone realises," Boucher said. "He is a far better one-day player than he is given credit for. It is either those who have an issue with him, and have a chip on their shoulders, or those who have ulterior motives." These comments landed Boucher in a disciplinary hearing, for which the finding is expected soon.

Boucher will argue that CSA came down disproportionately hard on him and many observers believe it is no coincidence that the conflict has coincided with the rise of Norman Arendse to the presidency. Arendse has been involved in many fiery disputes and his lack of sympathy for players was clear when he represented Zimbabwe Cricket with rottweiler-like aggression in their dealings with their own disenchanted players.

Boucher may yet win his case, but he and his team-mates have been shown in no uncertain terms that they work for a new boss who is poles apart from the man he replaced, the genial Ray Mali.

It is Kallis, however, who remains at the centre of this debate. While his record is immense, enough to rank him alongside Graeme Pollock and Barry Richards as the greatest of South African batsmen, there are still mutterings that he does not dominate bowling attacks enough. In particular, his failure to collar the Australians in the World Cup has been held against him. Kallis reacted to criticism over his slow scoring in the showpiece tournament in the Caribbean by getting out to uncharacteristic slogs in the crucial loss to New Zealand and the semi-final defeat to Australia.

South Africa's Twenty20 squad was actually chosen nearly a month ago, on the morning of the tournament launch in Johannesburg. So CSA and the selectors had at least two weeks in which to talk to Kallis and discuss the reasons for leaving him out.

Unsurprisingly, the player himself has not bought convenor Joubert Strydom's comments that Kallis has been "rested". Four one-day internationals in Ireland have been the only cricket he has played since the World Cup.

So how much consultation was there with the vice-captain before the shock announcement? None, it would seem. So much for a new era in which the players are supposedly considered shareholders in South African cricket. At the very least, CSA's man-management has been shocking.

It didn't take long for Kallis to figure out that the main reason for his omission was his batting style. Practically from the start of his international career, he has been told to stay in and be the rock around which an often fragile South African top order can bat, so his anger when this was used against him is understandable, even if his response was petulant.

The South African team certainly cannot afford to have Kallis selling his considerable wares to a salivating international market and, if the selectors had been thinking a bit more laterally, they may have spotted that the Twenty20 World Championship provides the ideal opportunity for their star batsman to shake off the shackles that he believes have been imposed on him by the last five national coaches.

Do Cricket South Africa want to get even more out of their champion run-scorer or do Arendse and Co want to punish him for that semi-final defeat to Australia? Either way, it has been the stickiest of starts to the new season in South Africa, after it all looked so promising a month ago.