Not only are Western Province failing to produce national cricketers, they’re not winning anything

It’s a parlour game (but still interesting) to have a good look at where South Africa’s cricketers in the third Test against Australia went to school.

Four of them, we now know because it’s been widely publicised, went to St Stithians College, with a fifth (Temba Bavuma) going to St Davids in Inanda, 5km away from St Stithians’ large Randburg campus in northern Johannesburg.

Two of the 11 — Aiden Markram and Simon Harmer — went to Pretoria Boys’ High, while Marco Jansen went to Potchefstroom Gimnasium. Eight of the 11, therefore, went to highveld schools, or schools in Gauteng and the North West (Jansen).

Of the other three members of the team, Gerald Coetzee went to St Andrew’s College in Bloemfontein, while Matthew Breetzke went to Grey High in Gqeberha. Finally, David Bedingham went to Wynberg Boys’ High in Cape Town, which brings to two the number of players from coastal schools, a situation which would have been unthinkable in the age, 50 years ago, of Barry Richards and the Pollock brothers, who went to Durban High School and Grey High, respectively.

There are many ways to slice this information but one salient feature jumps out. Bedingham has now been released from the Proteas squad to face Bangladesh for the first time in mid-November, as his international career seems finally to have spluttered to an end. With Kyle Verreynne losing the wicketkeeper’s gloves after the first Test against Australia at Kingsmead, there are now no Western Province cricketers in the Test side.

This is softened slightly by the fact Zubayr Hamza (a former Rondebosch Boys’ pupil) has been added to the squad for the two Bangladesh Tests, but complicated by the idea that he is no longer a Western Province player.

You might have thought that Hamza would have been worth keeping in Cape Town. But the Lions are a more competitive, more exciting and more creative franchise. He knew what he was doing by moving; he has played himself back into the national side.

The Western Province (or Cobras) story has to be one of the saddest in contemporary cricket. It reminds me a little of a famous Bertolt Becht quote to the effect that famines are never naturally occurring, they’re always man-made.

The fact that WP are not producing harvests of Vernon Philanders and Jacques Kallises anymore is a man-made famine. More troubling is the fact that the disaster has been unfolding for the past 20 years, under the very noses of the people who should be doing something about it.

Not only are Western Province failing to produce national cricketers, they’re not winning anything. True, they won the One-Day Cup in 2023/4 but beyond that statistical outlier, one has to go back nearly 15 years to see consistent four-day (and other) successes.

For example, between 2009/10 and 2013/4 — five seasons in other words — they won the SuperSport or Sunfoil Series four times. This was under then-coach Richard Pybus, who had a method players like Justin Kemp swore by. Pybus, as he tells it, wanted to move on players in the twilight of their careers. This threatened them and the matter became racial. Pybus was shabbily treated by then CEO André Odendaal. Western Province has not won a four-day competition since.

In fact, they haven’t won anything since, bar their One-Day Cup win in 2023/4, yet the cricket people of the province seem unable to act. There seems to be such a poor grasp of the crisis that they did the opposite, with club chairpersons a couple of months ago voting overwhelmingly in favour of a constitutional amendment to prolong the incumbents’ terms of office. The proposal was finally squashed by Cricket South Africa.

At the moment the Cobras are fourth out of eight on the Pro20 Cup log, but two teams ahead of them (Boland, Warriors) have a game in hand. Their last game of the campaign is against the Lions at Newlands on Saturday, one they can’t be sure of winning. Hamza will be playing — against them. Might it be yet another example of WP’s predilection for same old, same old?