The night the albatross was lifted Part one

I am not a particularly emotional fella. Maybe a little. Never cried watching Oprah, or Titanic. Okay, Mufasa dying in the Lion King got me a little. Every single time I watch the damn film. But there was something about the performance the South African cricket team put up against a very game Sri Lankan team which brought tears to my eyes. Too understand why, you need to understand South African cricket. It’s methodical, it’s structured. It’s about winning. That is all. It’s also had an albatross around its neck since before I was born. Nobody, but nobody could have imagined the night the weather wreaked havoc with our aspirations in Sydney ’92 that it would be nearly exactly twenty-three years before we would win a knock out match in the World Cup. My first experience with the World Cup failure was that night in Durban when rain and rather strange scientific calculators conspired to prevent us from succeeding against the Sri Lankans. We didn’t lose, but we didn’t win either. And more importantly, in a high pressure situation, we didn’t execute skills which any you could be reasonably expected to execute. In this case, the skill was typing numbers into a computer. We choked. That wasn’t our first brush with asphyxiation of course. The 1999 world cup was characterized not by the final, but by two incredibly bizarre mistakes to make by the South African team. No one will ever know why Herschelle Gibbs, as good a fielder as the world has ever seen, felt the need to celebrate before the ball was completely in his control. Steve Waugh didn’t really tell him, “you just dropped the world cup”, but he didn’t have to. Hindsight and history did a pretty good job of getting that point across all on their own. The Semifinal is often regarded as the essential gold standards in which all ODI games are judged. Rightfully so too, it was an outstanding match with fabulous performances from all-time greats, a fantastic knock from the player of the tournament, and an ending so dramatic, you wouldn’t believe it . We also choked away a win having done a remarkable job to even get ourselves to a place where victory was not an improbable theory. Come 2007, we didn’t choke, so much as have a brain fade the size of which can’t really be quantified. It beggars belief that in the middle of a collapse in Calypso, not one player thought it prudent to maybe try get themselves in first,. Assess conditions. Try not follow the guy who just got dismissed. The idea eventually came to mind, of course. At about 27/5. 2011 Was an ever bigger disaster. Kallie of all people tried taking on the biggest player in the team, on the longest boundary on the ground. It did not end well. Fantastic catch mind you. Faf got into a melee, and elimination swiftly followed. It has been a long journey to that world cup KO match win. One which includes failures in ICC Champions Trophy events, and other failures on smaller scales...

What South Africa can learn from the British boxing model.

At this stage of the game there are kids in South Africa who have never in their lives seen a fight on the telly. Contrast this to the United Kingdom. They have minor fights on Channel five. Mega local cards on Sky, international superfights on Boxnation (that's right... The United Kingdom has a financially viable boxing network), and just recently, ITV has gotten themselves into the mix, attaining the rights to show the next Carl Frampton fight. Four competing channels mean the British fan has all his needs taken care of, and fighters can fight for the absolute best purses possible. Contrast this with a rather dire situation in South Africa, where boxing is almost exclusively shown on Supersport. Even the recently concluded Premier Boxing League, when it was on eTV, was banished to a late time slot, which would have hurt it's circulation figures. But if the current state of British boxing, where fights are held at the Wembley, and fights between two rather middling heavyweights like Tyson Fury and Dereck Chisora can sell out 10 000+ seat arenas is a story of success - and it certainly is - it is also a story of redemption from which we can learn. The first thing we have to understand though, is that even a viable South African boxing scene is never going to be as financially lucrative as a British one. The current, and future economic outlooks are too far apart to ever have realistic designs on matching up. What we can do, however is learn lessons from them and apply them to our reality. When looking at the current state of prosperity which British boxing finds itself in, it's a little easy to forget that not too long ago, there was no boxing on BBC, and that as recently as five or six years ago Sky was very strongly considering scrapping it's boxing program. What changed? Well, put simply, British boxing had an influx of personalities. Where they had basics only had Ricky Hatton and a fringe star in Amir Khan a few years ago, they now have an assortment of fighters who are, if not household names, then guys whose names have a sense of familiarity. Carl Froch has fought at the Wembley, but before that he's been selling out arenas since the Super Six. Frampton vs Quigg is a fight the average British boxing fan is itching to see get made. Groves, Johnson, Khan, Brook, Eubanks Jr., Fury. These are all big names, and equally important for a sport trying to pry itself out of the fringes, big personalities. In contrast, I honestly don't think the local scene has one transcendent persona. The guy who gets columns in the paper even when he isn't fighting. Daily Mail can tell you all about Amir Khan's love life and holidays. We don't have that equivalent. Of course, we don't even have that for the rugby and soccer stars, but those are huge sports. They can survive without one mention out of the sport pages. Boxing needs to be on the front page, the society pages... It needs to infiltrate public awareness. Without this, it becomes a difficult affair. What local boxing does absolutely need though, is privatisation. Government should be nowhere near the sport. Boxing SA should become a self run and governed body, with government only overseeing matters. Doing things like investigating qualifications of employees. But certainly not making the employments themselves. British Boxing board of Control don't negotiate TV deals on Matchroom's behalf. Good governance should be like good structural support... I shouldn't notice it's there.