Why I wont attend one game this summer (Eng vs SA)

[DingDong]

Harsh no

It is bad in general for cricket. I am all for players rights to do what they may but my issue is more with being a South African cricket fan paying international prices to see what will soon be half SA vs SA. Do not forget that part of revenues earned on ticket sales go to development of cricket in SA. Now I ask you if it is fair to pay this development fee to develop other countries players?

I wish ICC was more like fifa. It is not impossible to say that an england team one day could very well be just SA born players.

Further one can safely say that SA is already the better cricket nation between the 2 countries given that they are able to produce a team and a half of international quality while england can not even manage a full team.

it isnt englands fault sa players are coming over there. sa needs to deal with those issues first. but yeah i understand your frustration at having to pay full price for games.

maybe they should call the english side 'the combined eng/sa XI' and charge half the price for sa games.

 

[zaremba]

Harsh no

It is bad in general for cricket. I am all for players rights to do what they may but my issue is more with being a South African cricket fan paying international prices to see what will soon be half SA vs SA. Do not forget that part of revenues earned on ticket sales go to development of cricket in SA. Now I ask you if it is fair to pay this development fee to develop other countries players?

I wish ICC was more like fifa. It is not impossible to say that an england team one day could very well be just SA born players.

Further one can safely say that SA is already the better cricket nation between the 2 countries given that they are able to produce a team and a half of international quality while england can not even manage a full team.

You seem to be angry about 3 different things but haven't managed to distinguish them in your mind.

First, you complain about the number of SA-developed players in the England squad. There are two, KP and Trott, in a squad of 16.

Second, you complain about the make-up of the team in the future. Well the England team that's currently touring your country and which you are choosing to boycott is not a team teleported back in time from the future, it is the current England team.

Third, you complain about "SA born players" in the England team (present or future). This has nothing to do with development funds. How many SA Rand were spent on developing Matt Prior or Andrew Strauss? Zero. These guys happen to be SA born but have grown up, been educated, and learned their cricket in England.

Your concluding flourish - "our country is the better cricket nation" - shows an engaging level of patriotism but hardly adds to the clarity or persuasiveness of your post.

 

[Langeveldt]

You do realize that the situation is almost entirely the fault of the South African selection processes and the lack of money in this country in the first place? It's hard to blame anything on England, who get a nice stream of talented players coming through and can nearly ignore their own grass roots talent, or lack of it, who knows.. What will hopefully happen is that England will become so reliant on imported talent, the flow of which will eventually stop, leaving them with no talent pool to choose from..

 

[zaremba]

Meh, the problems of English cricket are much more fundamental than that. The big problem is that it's not played by enough people and not followed by enough people. The problems associated with player imports are a drop in the ocean compared with that issue.

 

[Richard]

Meh, the problems of English cricket are much more fundamental than that. The big problem is that it's not played by enough people and not followed by enough people.

Ind33d - has been the problem for many years and has been exacerbated by many deliberate choices made by those in power (eg taking home Tests off live FTA TV) over those years. Cricket is never going to be a majority sport in this country but it is just a little important that maximum effort is made to maximise exposure to it.

A couple of South Africans, and maybe more to come (Kieswetter isn't the only one who's just decided out-of-the-blue to throw his lot in with England though I still don't imagine the likes of Pietersen, Trott and himself are going to become commonplace), playing in the national side is an inevitable by-product of that, but that is a minor matter in the big picture.

 

[GIMH]

Nice original idea for a thread. see the posts from zaremba, Brumby, dav, Richard etc for my opinion.