Ontong row threatens to split South African cricket

The crisis in South African cricket sparked by United Cricket Board president Percy Sonn's intervention in the team to play Australia in the third Test deepened on Thursday as rifts along racial and political lines became ever more clear.

Sonn vetoed the South African team originally chosen for the third Test with the result that Justin Ontong replaced Jacques Rudolph on the morning of the match. Sonn's justification was that Ontong had been chosen for the tour to cover for the lower order batsmen while Rudolph was a top order player.

When Lance Klusener flew home after the second Test, South Africa intended to bat Rudolph at three with Boeta Dippenaar moving down to six. Sonn vetoed this selection, citing UCB policy which, he claimed, would have denied Ontong, a coloured player, the opportunity of representing his country.

In the wake of Sonn's action, South African cricket has been in uproar, a situation which took a bizarre new twist on Thursday when Sonn, in an apparent about face, said that there was a place for banned former captain Hansie Cronje in South African cricket.

"Hansie is one of us," Sonn on Australian radio. "He is a son of South Africa cricket. He is entitled to the freedom and liberties of all South Africans and there is a place for him in our cricket."

Previously Sonn had said that Cronje should not be allowed to play beach cricket.

This, however, is something of a sideshow to the real issue which has to do with the future of South African cricket. Those who have criticised Sonn's intervention in selection have been almost automatically labelled as opponents of "transformation", the process whereby South African cricket hoped to move from its divided past into a future in which all the various peoples of the country are given opportunities to play the game.

As an obvious consequence of the transformation process, cricketers from race groups disadvantaged under apartheid are to be given preferential treatment and minimum quotas are in place for the selection of teams at junior and provincial level.

For the national team, however, the only provision is that it should not be an all-white team. As the row has flared, though, it has been suggested that this is not the first occasion that Sonn has insisted that certain players should be selected, but it is the first time that this has become public.

In terms of the UCB constitution, the president does have a right of veto. How he uses it, however, has become the issue. UCB chief executive Gerald Majola has been caught in the middle of the row and apart from confirming that the president has the right to veto a team and reiterating selection policy has had little to say about Sonn's decision.

It is known, however, that Majola has made numerous unsuccessful attempts to contact Sonn, and the truth is probably that he is as much in the dark about the details of the row as anyone.

Majola is likely to fly to Australia on Monday in an attempt to defuse the crisis. Sonn, meanwhile, is expected to return to South Africa immediately after the third Test.

The controversy has been intermittently fuelled by the comments of the Sports Minister, Ncgonde Balfour and his spokesman, Graham Abrahams. Abrahams, for instance, fatuously remarked this week that the row was only because Ontong was a black player. It hardly needs to be stated that Ontong would not be playing in the third Test if he were not a black player.

A host of former South African cricketers, all of them white, have condemned Sonn's actions, among them Clive Rice, Ray Jennings, Pat Symcox, Adrian Kuiper and Fanie de Villiers. Rice, Jennings and Symcox were singled out by Abrahams on Thursday as having made their living from cricket during the apartheid era. Symcox's response was that he first played for South Africa in 1993, two years after South African cricket had unified and three years after Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the African National Congress was unbanned.

At the centre of it all, though, stand Sonn and Graeme Pollock, South African cricket's most famous name. Pollock revealed Sonn's veto on Australia during the first day of the Test, prompting Sonn to say that Pollock might have to "face the music" for breaching the confidentiality of the selection committee. Pollock has no intention of resigning his position and it may yet come to a showdown between the two men to see who stands down first.

With the World Cup scheduled to be staged in South African in just over a year's time, neither the country's cricketers nor its administration seem in any condition to cope with a tournament of this magnitude.

On Thursday Rice urged South Africa's cricketers to rebel against the UCB. That South Africa's first post-isolation captain should have been moved to this extreme position shows how much damage has already been done. The worst of it is that there is no sign at this point of the crisis being resolved.