The best thing Thabang Moroe can do for South African cricket is to announce his resignation at tomorrow’s special press conference in Joburg.
But don’t bet on that. South African sports administrators have a habit of sticking around far longer than they should, even when the tide of public opinion has clearly turned against them or their sport is in tatters.
And that is exactly where cricket is right now - in tatters. In today’s sports pages we are running a graphic titled “Timeline of Chaos” (see page 23) where at a glance you will be able to cast an eye over the long list of debacles that have plagued our cricket for some time now.
But it would be remiss of us to not highlight once again one of the most troubling of those debacles.
On Sunday, we had to endure the disgraceful incident in which Stuart Hess, one of Independent Media’s cricket writers, had his accreditation revoked and could not enter the Wanderers to report on an Mzansi Super League match. Four other journalists suffered the same fate. After a few hours of turbulence and outrage on social media, their accreditation was suddenly reinstated. This was followed by a whole series of contradictory and sometimes baffling messages from the Cricket South Africa leadership.
Finally, Moroe personally phoned Hess to apologise. But apologies, no matter how sincere they may be, are no longer enough. Similarly, even if Moroe truly has cricket’s best interests at heart, he is presiding over a sport in chaos with the first Test against England just 20 days away. And we still do not have an official coach or director of cricket in place! Imagine how Proteas captain Faf du Plessis is feeling right now.
Moroe has to do the honourable thing and quit. Yet there are reports indicating that CSA’s head of communications and media, Thami Mthembu, might be made the scapegoat at tomorrow’s press conference, and that Moroe will simply issue another apology to players, stakeholders, sponsors, the public and the media.
The great game of cricket deserves so much better than this.