Double Headers

106 South Africa - Welcome to the triple-header to bring the number of teams in each Section up to five. The admission of this second Transvaal side to the Currie Cup is described in Brian Bassano’s history of the period as “a decision which was to become as controversial as the splitting of the provinces into two sections in 1951/52”. 87 Unfortunately he gave no detail of this controversy elsewhere in his book (and neither does he of the apparent 1951/52 controversy), so we are left to wonder exactly what form it took. 88 Thus in 1959/60 and subsequent seasons, two Transvaal sides, known as Transvaal and Transvaal B, competed in the Currie Cup. As long as they remained in separate Sections, the two sides would be spared the potential embarrassment of meeting each other; to make certain that this never happened, the competition rules were amended to preclude the relegation of the ‘A’ side 89 , or the promotion of the B side. Thus when Transvaal B won the B Section in 1962/63, 1969/70, 1974/75, 1976/77 and 1984/85 they were not promoted, and when the senior side finished bottom of Section A in 1974/75 and 1975/76 they were not relegated. The same provisions applied when other B teams joined the competition in later years. In particular, these rules meant that in 1974/75 when Transvaal finished bottom of Section A in the same season as Transvaal B won Section B, the sides did not swap places, even though the normal one-up one-down promotion and relegation rules would have allowed them to do so. There was, of course, opportunity for those who had done well in the B team in 1974/75 to become the core of the Section A side for 1975/76 - and vice versa - but this did not happen in practice. It is also worth mentioning that Transvaal B did actually finish ahead of Transvaal in the Currie Cup in one season. This was in 1960/61, when for one year only the Currie Cup reverted to a single league. But this was not an ‘all play all’ league, and so the two Transvaal sides still did not meet. Transvaal B, with a weaker fixture list than the senior team, ended the season in fourth place out of ten, two places above their own first eleven. Right from the start of the new arrangements in 1959/60, Transvaal’s ‘A’ and B squads were not mutually exclusive. The two sides were simply the province’s first and second elevens, as selected match-by-match. Thus in that first season, eight of the 16 players who represented Transvaal in Section A also played, in the same season, for Transvaal B in Section B. But players generally had to make their way through the ranks before reaching Section A: all of the eight cricketers who made their first-class debuts when representing Transvaal in 1959/60 (who, incidentally, included Ali Bacher and Eddie Barlow) made their first appearances in the B team. During this first season of 1959/60, there were six occasions when Transvaal and Transvaal B played first-class matches simultaneously. 87 Brian Bassano: South African Cricket Volume 4 1947-1960 , Cricket Connections International, 1996. 88 Surprisingly, the contemporary South African Cricket Annuals make no comment on the background to, or even the fact of, the admission of a second Transvaal side to the Currie Cup. 89 The senior side was officially known simply as Transvaal and the junior side as Transvaal B, and this same naming practice was later adopted by the other unions as other B sides were admitted to first-class competitions. Where necessary to distinguish the sides, I refer to the senior side as the ‘A’ side.