Sydney, Nov.8 (ANI): South Africa is hard-pressed to find any black players except Lonwabo Tsotsobe.
According to cricket columnist Peter Roebuck, South Africa's inability to produce black players is disappointing and dangerous.
Every October, 12 top schools take part in a cricket week held in Pietermaritzburg. If anything, the number of black players appearing has fallen in the past 19 years.
Roebuck says that several factors lie behind this failure to develop black players.
Roebuck quotes Professor Tim Noakes as saying that a complete sporting transformation is not possible until diets in the poorer communities are improved.
He recommends children grow up on "exactly what the great Springbok rugby players from the farms have always eaten - high in fat and protein.
This is also what the Pacific Islanders eat - except their food is based on a high fish intake.
Any population you find that is tall, muscular and lean with well developed bone structure is eating a high fat/protein diet.
By Noakes's reckoning, Ntini stayed fit because he was spotted at an early age and was sent to a middle-class boarding school. Other quicks have broken down.
Cricket is also a family game. Brothers, sisters, sons and daughters regularly break through. Until South Africa has a large black community steeped in the game, it cannot expect to thrive, opines Roebuck in an article for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Cricket is also an expensive game. In the formative years, it can be played with a lemon and branch but anyone hoping to progress needs costly clothing and kit. That is well nigh impossible for most inhabitants of a country enduring high levels of youth unemployment, and the turmoil that inevitably and rightly follows.
As far as black cricket is concerned, Zimbabwe remains a step ahead of its neighbour. The emergence of capable black cricketers is due to scholarship programs introduced long ago, and to the excellence of local second- and third-tier schools, an advantage denied black South Africans by an apartheid regime determined to keep them as peasants.
Poor leadership at CSA has not helped. From Ali Bacher onwards, there's been too much talk and too little work. Ntini was not a product of the system; he was a fluke.
South African cricket has come a long way, but there is a long way still to go. (ANI)
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