JOHANNESBURG – Dave Richardson said the committee he will head up to review South African cricket’s domestic structures will have to work fast as whatever recommendations it makes, must be in place for next season.
Richardson, brought on board by Cricket SA as a consultant in the wake of its catastrophic administrative failures, will be in charge of a committee also comprising of new interim Director of Cricket Graeme Smith and CSA’s Chief Financial Officer Pholetsi Moseki.
“We are talking about structures that need to be in place for next season and contracts will have to start being signed up by February/March/April of 2020. It’s an urgent project and hopefully we will have made a lot of progress by the end of January next year,” said the former ICC chief executive.
The committee would have included a representative from the players union, the SA Cricketers’ Association, but yesterday morning its chief executive, Tony Irish cited the on-going court case it has against CSA as the reason for it not participating with the committee.
“The fact that CSA is now, for the first time, going to look into what the domestic structure should be is a clear admission that the decision eight months ago was taken without this being done. This is precisely why we had to launch legal proceedings against CSA,” said Irish.
“Given that this is the subject of the court application we cannot participate in a formal committee where decisions taken by it may affect the outcome of the court case.
It is therefore obvious to us that the restructure decision must be withdrawn and the court case settled with us first.”