Turning on the light in South Africa

It was pretty shabby compared to say BBC, or even Channel 9, usually highlights packages of matches played around the world. There was an occasional special deal involving the Caribbean (most people in South Africa wanted to see the Windies in action).

What hit an already paranoid and insular white South African society was how the game had become so deeply embedded in the quagmire of isolation.

To this end, Ali Bacher realised how something radical was needed to refurbish domestic interest. It was a sport in decay as schools began to turn away from its still elitist image. This was further highlighted in a 1979 social study for a marketing company that discovered that in Johannesburg and Cape Town, cricket was now a sport for the yuppies (including Asians and coloureds) with their fancy cars and girlfriends.

While the rebel tours of the 1980s juxtaposed sport philosophies and further fractured sections of society, Bacher realised the need to package the sport in TV schedules to create an added attraction to a public aware of growing change. The low-key Sri Lanka tour of 1982 and that by the West Indies under Lawrence Rowe were ideal vehicles. Sponsor and commercial interests suddenly focussed anew on the game. Added to this was the day/night series that became a social event.

Advertising hype was built around such games, fierce provincial rivalry spilled into the media and names such as Clive Rice, Garth le Roux, Barry Richards, Mike Procter became big news.

In this Bacher knew that he had the medium through which he could successfully sell the game to the public, and he exploited this. He looked to the spin-offs in advertising and a portion of sponsored funds went into spreading the sport among the disadvantaged. Coaching in black areas started in the early 1980s.

Just as the Afrikaner had taken to the game based on the success of the teams in the mid- and late 1960s, and the interest matured over a period of 25 years, so too did a black population, many who until 1984 were generally excluded in such regions as the Free State and the Transvaal.

What Bacher put together in the TV packaged deals was making a privileged community aware of not only the need to spread the game but also have it take on a social and family role in the smaller communities. Initially he used desperately needed sponsors’ funds to pay the SABC to screen games until a deal in the mid-1980s changed that image.

For five seasons from 1986/87, domestic first-class and limited-overs games were carefully built into segments with the hectic mid-summer holiday period given over to the first-class (Currie Cup) programme.

Apart from a earning a large following, players to emerge were Jonty Rhodes, Hansie Cronje, Brian McMillan, Fanie de Villiers, Gary Kirsten and Andrew Hudson. Peter Kirsten, Rice and Jimmy Cook had long been on the scene. It was Bacher’s argument that the game had a social responsibility to the community as a whole and not just for the whites that created a climate of co-operation. If it was to survive in a modern society, it needed to be embraced by a growing TV audience.

In this way, the game survived the isolation years.