Settle in, because this dumpster fire needs much unpacking.

This Boxing Day, December 26, SuperSport Park in Pretoria will host the first test of a four-match series against England.

On the field, the Proteas have a number of serious issues to deal with, having suffered what I will kindly refer to as total humiliation during their most recent series in India.

That’s not to mention the humbling we suffered at the hands of Sri Lanka on home turf earlier in the year, but somehow Cricket South Africa (CSA) has managed to ensure that our onfield woes are currently second fiddle to maladministration and autocracy of the highest order.

The sport’s governing body has been unravelling at the seams for a while now (the warning bells were ringing at full volume in August), but the events of the past week have shown that CSA has lost the plot.

It’s tough to know where to begin, but let’s rewind to last week and this article on IOL by local journo Stuart Hess, focusing on how CSA is all ‘cloaks and daggers’ around who is going to select the Proteas’ team to face England:

On Wednesday, Cricket South Africa’s Head of Media and Communications, Thamie Mthembu, said a “technical team,” would select the squad for the England series, but besides [interim head coach, Enoch] Nkwe’s name, he refused to identify any other members of the “technical team.”

“There is a team that is responsible for the selection of players and a team that is responsible for ensuring that, come the date of the English tour or any other tour, there are players who’ve been selected. If you want us to go on a naming exercise, I’m afraid I will not engage in that.”

CSA has yet to name a director of cricket (more on that later), who will be tasked with an oversight role similar to that which Rassie Erasmus will now take on for the Springboks.

When Hess pressed Mthembu for more details on the selection team, things veered into the realms of ANC spokesperson talk:

Asked by Independent Media to name the care-taker Director of Cricket, Mthembu replied: “I’m not going to reveal names, for reasons that you know.”

In fact Mthembu, when asked for the identity of the “team” that will be selecting the South African squad, said: “Why do you wish to know this?”

Told that the South African public would be interested in knowing who will pick the team of players that will take the field to represent the country against England, Mthembu remarked: “I don’t know any reader who would be interested.”

Hands up if you’re interested in knowing who will select our team. Yeah, I thought so.

In a follow-up IOL article two days later, Hess expanded on how farcical the situation has become:

CSA’s communication skills are so bad as to be non-existent. They don’t know how to communicate with the South African public – the most important entity in the game in this country – nor do they know how to communicate with the players and they don’t know how to communicate with each other, whether it be the staff at CSA or the administrators…

It is a state of affairs one former senior Proteas player described to me as “embarrassing” and he only used that word because he was at a loss for anything else.

But it is embarrassing. The Proteas players are about to face one of the most high profile series of their careers, and they don’t know if they will be picked and who will pick them.

At the centre of it all is Thabang Moroe [above], whose appointment as CSA CEO is rapidly beginning to resemble Hlaudi Motsoeneng’s crippling reign as king of the SABC.

Operating unchecked, and systematically removing all the balances put in place to prevent autocratic rule, Moroe seems to be pulling all sorts of strings behind the scenes, very few of which have the best interests of the Proteas and provincial players at heart.

Also, he seems to have taken on the Trumpian approach to ‘alternate facts’, as evident through his maniacal assertion that the Mzansi Super League, blighted by apathy and terrible attendances this year, is the second-most-watched T20 league in the world.

A few stats via Cricinfo before we move on:

Turn on the television and you will see empty stands, especially at the cavernous 34,000-seater Wanderers Stadium, where only 4840 people attended the tournament opener. Almost 2000 fewer turned up at the second game (attendance was counted as 2844) and the first 1000 were let in for free.

At Kingsmead, where the first match was rained off, a little more than 300 tickets were sold for the game against Tshwane Spartans, and Port Elizabeth’s first match pulled a crowd of fewer than 1000 people.

Yes, it’s being shown on SABC3, which means that millions of South Africans can watch the action, but comments like these have Hlaudi written all over them.

There’s far more to be said on that front, but for now, we must move on to what happened yesterday, with Hess, as well as four other cricket journalists who have been critical of CSA in recent times, having their media accreditation pulled without warning.

Hess has written about that experience here, but I’ll go for the overview via Sport24’s Rob Houwing to drive home the point of just how farcical, and worrying, this has become.

He’s called CSA “an increasingly crackpot Kremlin”:

…South Africa’s tumble toward a significantly more minnow-in-character status – a widening pack, I fear – has gathered violent steam subsequently.

CSA, under the watch of controversially re-entrenched president Chris Nenzani [below] and CEO Thabang Moroe, is currently beset by multi-pronged chaos, which may even be putting it mildly.

It is in oppressive financial strife, dogged by complex, in-house litigation on several fronts, has overseen a flight of once loyal, blue-chip sponsors and broadcasters, and has generally, in a spectacular welter of dithering and interim-themed appointments to key positions, shown all the parallels of a crumbling, haemorrhaging South African parastatal where a select few perversely so often still manage to prosper.

Houwing then mentions Hess’ situation yesterday – his media accreditation was later reinstated via an impersonal email after a massive social media backlash – as being indicative of a larger problem:

…all it does is underline the sense of high farce that accompanies episodes of heavy-handedness and erratic tendencies from the CSA bigwigs these days.

This press censorship move has been perhaps the most sinister, worrisome development of modern CSA’s tawdry pile of them, really.

It reeks of desperate, reckless paranoia.

By the way, CSA couldn’t even get its lies straight. Moroe appeared on eNCA to say that Hess was being punished for ‘sensationalist’ writing, but then other communication from the body said that the loss of accreditation was due to computer error.

You know the wheels are coming off when half-truths, and outright untruths, are being spewed by everyone in the organisation in an effort to cover its tracks.

Some might say this below is slightly hyperbolic, but we’ve seen this slide in just about every other area that government has meddled in over the past two decades:

It has strong shades of a shameless, jackboot politburo, bringing no credit to our supposedly freed country, and its practices must be stopped in a hurry.

Or are we prepared to idly tolerate the prospect of CSA accelerating a gestapo-like march toward patterns closely related to a lamentable flashpoint “heyday” of the neighbouring Zimbabwe Cricket Union in periods stained by Robert Mugabe’s evil influence?

Exactly this – who is really calling the shots here? Who does Moroe answer to? What is the endgame?

As it stands, we are still in the dark here, and the only light at the end of the tunnel would be the seemingly imminent employment of Graeme Smith as the all-important director of cricket.

Here’s what ran yesterday in the Sunday Times:

Graeme Smith is set to be named Cricket SA’s new director of cricket in the coming weeks.

The Sunday Times has it on good authority that Smith will put pen to paper on a four- year contract that will run until the end of the next Cricket World Cup, which will be hosted in India in 2023…

It is understood Smith will have carte blanche to decide who will be the team director. The post is currently occupied by Highveld Lions coach Enoch Nkwe on an interim basis…

“Because it is a new position, CSA want to give him the confidence of deciding how things must be arranged,” said another source. He must set up his stall in the way he believes will help turn the tide for the national teams.”

Great stuff, and nice quotes from those ‘sources’, but the man himself is saying something completely different. Earlier this morning, Smith tweeted this:

I think we all know what those concerns are.

Smith wants the chance to make the big calls himself, and Moroe and those really pulling the strings (you work it out) are almost certainly unwilling to give him that so-called ‘carte blanche’.

Until an impasse can be reached there, you can’t blame the former skipper for taking his commentary big bucks and steering well clear of an organisation that is well and truly falling apart.

Finally, Moroe appeared on Breakfast with Bongani Bingwa on 702 this morning to defend CSA’s yanking of media accreditation, saying they did so because they weren’t given the chance to comment on some of those stories.

Patently false – at least in the case of Hess – but if you’re a sucker for punishment, you can listen to that drivel below:

These coming weeks could be seminal in deciding what happens with cricket in this country over the next few years.

Everyone who cares needs to continue to hold Cricket South Africa accountable before the damage becomes irreparable.

UPDATE: CSA has now released this statement on Twitter:

I don’t see an apology anywhere in there.

My gut tells me that some of the big sponsors put a little pressure on CSA, but I guess the word ‘sorry’ is too much to ask for.

[sources:iol&iol&cricinfo&sport24&sundaytimes]