Double Headers

109 South Africa - Welcome to the triple-header The propriety of granting first-class status to ‘B’ XIs was under challenge throughout the 1990s. After much to-ing and fro-ing over the years on the subject, their first-class status - and the scope for double-headers involving provincial A and B XIs - was finally withdrawn after the 1998/99 season. Since 2004/05 there have been two separate domestic first-class competitions in South Africa. The more senior - the direct descendant of the Currie Cup - is currently (2012/13) known as the Sunfoil Series, and features ‘franchise’ sides that take the best players from the various combinations of provinces that they represent. The junior competition is the CSA Three-Day Provincial Competition, which currently features 14 sides broadly aligned with the old provincial unions, but including separate sides for KwaZulu-Natal and KwaZulu-Natal Inland, along with a new side representing South Western Districts (the area immediately east of Cape Town), and a new ‘overseas’ side from Namibia. For the record, the KwaZulu-Natal and KwaZulu-Natal Inland sides represent separate cricket unions (with their headquarters at Durban and Pietermaritzburg respectively), and so simultaneous matches by these two sides do not meet this book’s definition of a double-header as one involving two teams with the same name or representing the same geographical or cricketing entity. With their best players creamed off for the Sunfoil Series, the provincial sides in the CSA Three-Day Competition may be regarded as something akin to ‘second elevens’. But unless there is a radical restructuring of domestic cricket in the future, it seems as though the days of genuine double-headers in South Africa is now finally over. Its end had come in February 1999 with these instances: Season Play dates Fixture Venue Winners 1998/99 25-26-27-28 Feb Boland v Griqualand West Paarl Drawn 26-27-28 Feb North West v Griqualand West B Fochville NW 25-26-27-28 Feb Eastern Province v KwaZulu Natal Port Elizabeth EP 25-26-27 Feb KwaZulu Natal B v Western Province B Durban WP B 25-26-27-28 Feb Western Province v Border Cape Town Drawn Phase 3 - 1971/72 to 1990/91 Phase 3 overlaps chronologically with Phase 2, for reasons which will become apparent. This being South Africa, the teams that we have looked at so far, at least until the early 1990s, were ‘whites only’. But alongside the matches played under the auspices of SACA, the governing body of whites-only cricket in apartheid days, competitive inter-provincial matches were also being played by non-racial teams, under the auspices of the South African Cricket Board of Control (SACBOC; from 1977/78, the South African Cricket Board, or SACB). In 1971/72 these matches began to be played over three days, which meant that, for the first time, they met one at least