On day 3 at the Khaya Majola Week

It was Nat minister Piet Koornhof who was reputed to have said, “those are my principles, but if you don’t like them, I have others”.

I was reminded of that in Bloemfontein on Sunday while we were watching Boland play Western Province in a T20 game at the Coca-Cola Khaya Majola Week.

I noticed, well actually I already knew but checked the official brochure to make sure, that there were boys from the same school playing for both provinces on the field.

Yes, believe it or not: there were three players in the WP team who had Western Cape Sports School listed as the school they came from, and two in the Boland team who also hailed from there.

I noticed that we had officials from both provinces sheltering from the fierce Free Sate sun under the same shady tree we were, so I popped the not so innocent question “is it true, that boys from the same school play for different provinces down in the Western Cape?”

The response was illuminating, and might not have been as frank if the people involved in the ensuing discussion had realised that they were in the presence of most of the media contingent who are at the week this year.

Apart from the obvious animosity between the cricketing structures of the two provinces, which bubbled along underwater, and stuck its head up and out from time to time, it was clear that the imposition of the political Western Cape province on top of the Boland and Western Province cricket unions – both of them over 100 years old – has not been a smooth process.

What it has meant is that the official educational provincial boundaries are those of the Western Cape province, and the cricket unions don’t really exist as geographic entities.

So, it was short move (and, in education departmental terms, a legal one) to say, let’s allow our specialist sports school to supply players of colour to both unions.

And Cricket South Africa is clearly allowing it to happen because they want the talented young black African players they have identified to attend a school with a good coaching structure.

Because that’s what it is, it emerged from the discussion on Sunday. Both unions have placed talented players (black African players, in particular) on bursaries at the Western Cape sports school.

And while WP has 1^st choice (an issue that clearly does not sit well with the Boland guys) on the players at the school – it is in Cape Town, after all – each union is investing in players for its own future and can select them for weeks such as this one.

“It’s a special arrangement, one made specifically for the purpose of developing top cricketers of colour,” is how one of the officials described it.

I guess you can’t really knock an agreement that has been made with transformation and development in mind, but I’ve been sounding off on points of principle for a while now and if you allow boys to be chosen from schools outside of their province in one instance, how can you prohibit it in others?

It’s a bit like saying, “those are my principles, but if you don’t like them, I have others”.

Well, that’s my two cents worth, anyway.

Two days to go at the Coca-Cola Khaya Majola Week, and it’s been fabulous in Bloemfontein, as I knew it would be.