Daily Times

LONDON: Cricket South Africa announced the decision to launch a T20 league this year at its annual general meeting, after the CSA members council voted unanimously in favour of it. The tournament is expected to replace a T20 league that was to be launched originally in 2017 and will include six teams in a 30-match league phase. It will be played from November 9 to December 16, and will culminate with an eliminator match and a final. What is apparent immediately is that South Africa’s top cricketers will not be available for at least the first 10 days of the tournament, with the ODI squad touring Australia from October 31 to November 17.

No other details about the tournament are known at the moment, with sponsors and broadcasters also yet to be confirmed. Pay television channel SupersSport will screen the matches, despite pulling out of a 49% shareholding in a T20 league. There has been no mention of private ownership at this stage, with CSA bearing the costs of the tournament alone. However, the CSA has been threatened with legal action by four of the eight original owners of the GLT20 tournament who had reserved their rights to teams, if the new tournament was to go ahead without their involvement but CSA was unperturbed by this development and maintained that it has always acted in a way which it thought was best for the game, postponing the original tournament and changing the ownership model from being foreign-based to local-based to eventually in-house. CSA President Chris Nenzani said, “Chief Executive Thabang Moroe and his management team have come with a commercial model that is both financially viable and offers promise for an exciting and long-term future that meets all the conditions laid down by the CSA Board of Directors.

“We will never administer cricket in a manner that is not in line with good corporate governance. That is a sustainability issue. As the leadership we were comfortable that we had to postpone the T20 League in order to sustain the game in this country, which is our key mandate.” CSA announced its most recent financial figures at the AGM, with its revenue for the last financial year standing at USD 98.44 million, and a profit of USD 22.97 million. The figures suggest that the body has the requisite funds to finance the new league. South African Sports Minister Tokozile Xasa, also present at the AGM praised CSA for its “good governance”, and said that the body is being used “as an example of the best practice for all our codes to move in the right direction for both men and women.”

Published in Daily Times, September 9^th 2018.