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South African cricket fans have been dealt a double blow over the past few weeks.

Firstly, our Proteas team has been demolished in Pakistan, suffering the sort of consistent batting collapses that point to serious underlying issues.

If your Monday was ruined by watching us lose our last seven wickets for 33 runs, you’re not alone.

The other blow was the announcement by Cricket Australia (CA) that they were cancelling their tour to South Africa at the last minute, citing ‘medical advice’ and calling it “too dangerous” to travel to our shores.

Those who follow the game closely immediately smelled a rat, as CA has developed a recent habit of cancelling tours that don’t involve India, England (the other members of the now super-elite ‘Big Three’), or New Zealand.

Cricket South Africa (CSA) soon released a statement, and it wasn’t hard to read between the lines:

 CSA held many detailed discussions with CA regarding Covid-19 protocols….CSA worked hard to meet the changing demands of our Australian counterparts.

CSA is particularly disappointed given that South Africa recently hosted Sri Lanka in a bio-secure environment (BSE) at Centurion, with no breaches of protocol. Currently the Pakistan Women’s team are touring the country in a secure BSE in Durban…

“We are extremely disappointed by the decision of CA,” Director of Cricket, Graeme Smith, stated. “CSA has been working tirelessly in recent weeks to ensure that we meet every single expectation of CA…So to be informed about the CA decision at the eleventh hour is frustrating.”

South Africa has hosted successful tours from the Sri Lanka men’s team, as well as the Pakistani women’s team, but there’s no satisfying some people.

It doesn’t help that overseas media is fuelling horror stories about what has been dubbed ‘the SA variant’, after we were the first country to identify 501Y.V2, which has now been found across the globe, but that’s not what is happening.

Read the full CSA statement here, but what really stands out is the line about “worked hard to meet the changing demands of our Australian counterparts”.

Social media has been full of whispers about CA’s continuous moving of the goalposts, but local cricket journalist Neil Manthorp, writing on his excellent ‘Manners on Cricket’ blog, has now laid out what happened behind the scenes.

Manthorp says that the relationship between the two countries, already on thin ice after Sandpapergate dominated the Ozzies’ last tour to our shores,  “will take years to heal and the remaining scars will last even longer”:

If Cricket Australia’s last-minute cancellation of the tour was merely spineless and callow, it might have been excusable. But there was a background of cynicism based on what looked and sounded like casual prejudice. It transpired that there may also have been plenty of hypocrisy, selfishness and dishonesty to complete the recipe.

On six separate occasions, CA changed tack and requested different rules and requirements, and every time, CSA jumped through the hoops.

Some of those requests were downright ridiculous:

The staff at the Irene Country Club, just four kilometres from Centurion Park, venue for two of the three Tests, would have to isolate for three weeks before Australia arrived, never mind the two weeks accepted globally…

When the Australian delegation suggested that sharing the vast expanse of the Irene Country Club with their hosts was unacceptable, the hosts once again bowed down. Never mind the success of the Sri Lanka tour, the Proteas would stay elsewhere, creating a separate BSE at another venue at huge cost.

CA decided they didn’t want to fly into a commercial airport, so CSA pulled some strings and obtained permission for the plane carrying the players to fly into Lanseria.

Guess what? Suddenly the Ozzies decided they were flying in on a plane too large to land at Lanseria, and that’s where CSA drew the line.

No, actually CSA went to the relevant government ministries and obtained permission for the use of a private terminal at OR Tambo International Airport, which was granted.

CSA also promised use of the country’s top medical facilities, and purchased an expensive  Australian developed track-and-trace system, along with acquiescing to other requests.

There were no hoops left to jump through, and having exhausted every attempt to get CSA to pull the plug, Cricket Australia was left to do the dirty work themselves and announce the cancellation.

And now for the cherry on top – there are 19 Australian players waiting for clearance from CA to head to India for the IPL, but CA acting chief executive, Nick Hockley, says that’s different because the IPL has “a proven bio-security method in place”.

Please note that the last IPL was played in the UAE, so this is utter bollocks, really.

After all the discontent and murmuring online, with thinly-veiled statements imploring people to read between the lines, Manthorp has called this what it really is:

Just as parents who want to take their children out of school for a day to maximise a long week-end can acquire them, so can national cricket boards. It became embarrassingly obvious that Australia’s players had no intention of touring South Africa but, far worse, they had no stomach for telling the truth…

It is hard to know whether the decision to stay at home or the cynical dishonesty with which it was made, and announced, is the more despicable.

Our cricket board, in a financial mess that we have brought upon ourselves (thanks, Thabang Moroe and others), has now incurred further financial expenses trying to make the tour happen, only to see the rug yanked out at the last minute.

Cricinfo reports that CSA is so angered that the board has now written to the International Cricket Council, asking it “to consider means of redress for less wealthy nations to make up for financial losses when tours do not take place as scheduled”:

The letter, seen by ESPNcricinfo, called Australia’s unilateral decision to pull out of the series “against the spirit of sportsmanship”, with implications for the credibility of the World Test Championship (WTC), and raises concerns it will have a “serious impact on the financial well-being of less-wealthy” ICC members.

“There’s got to be some understanding of how we manage the impact to less-wealthy nations,” Stavros Nicolaou, the chairman of CSA’s interim board told ESPNcricinfo. “Unilateral decisions of this nature are punitive to less-wealthy cricket-playing nations and there has to be some discussion around redress.”

As the gulf in finances between the rest of the cricketing world and India, England, and Australia continues to grow, the chances of the other nations competing on and off the field diminishes.

Whether by default or by design, Australia’s decision to cancel their tour to our shores is a serious blow to the future of cricket in the country.

You can sign up to follow Manthorp’s musings here, which I would recommend for cricket fans who enjoy quality writing and the odd inside scoop.

[sources:csa&mannersoncricket&cricinfo]