ACS Overseas First-Class Annual 2019

401 South Africa in 2018/19 After the events of 2018 and 2019, it is just possible that South African first-class cricket, at both Test and domestic levels, will never be quite the same again.  When England beat Sri Lanka 3-0 in November 2018, South Africa moved from their long-held position of second in the ICC rankings down to third. They began their own Test season at home to Pakistan, and duly won the series 3-0 without having to exert themselves too much. The victory was owed mostly to the quick bowlers, among them Dale Steyn who finally went past Shaun Pollock to become South Africa’s all-time leading Test wicket-taker. But in the following series at home against sixth-ranked Sri Lanka, the quicker bowlers proved far less threatening, and when the batsmen were required to up their performance to compensate, they consistently failed to do so. Sri Lanka deservedly won both Tests, the first, memorably, by one wicket and the second by a more comfortable eight wickets.  After this, it came as little surprise when HashimAmla and Steyn announced their retirements from Test cricket. There was greater surprise when Duanne Olivier renounced his international career by becoming a Kolpak player with Yorkshire, joining other leading South African bowlers who had recently turned their backs on their home country, notably Kyle Abbott and Simon Harmer. With Morne Morkel and Imran Tahir having retired from Tests, South Africa’s bowling ranks look dangerously thin, while the loss of Amla and the re-withdrawal from Tests of A.B.de Villiers leave major holes in what had been such a strong batting line-up. With little sign of substantial new talent emerging – their ‘A’ side lost one and drew one of their matches during the season against India A, with no player pressing a claim to a lasting place in the Test side – South Africa will surely struggle to maintain even their current third place in the rankings.  Things were little better on the home front. CSA’s financial troubles were worsened by the withdrawal of the domestic sponsors (Sunfoil), so for 2018/19 the senior competition was known simply as the Four-Day Franchise Series. The final table showed a remarkable reversal from the previous season, with the 2017/18 champions Titans finishing bottom, and last year’s bottom side, Lions, finishing on the top. Cape Cobras had led the way for most of the season, but they were unable to beat Dolphins in their last match, while Lions beat Warriors to win their fourth match in a row and take the title for just the second time in the 15 seasons of the franchise era.  The usually quiet world of the junior first-class tournament, now known as the CSA Provincial Three-Day Cup, sprang its own surprises. Just as the season began, the 2017/18 beaten finalists Namibia – participants since 2006/07 – announced their withdrawal from the competition, citing the time and costs involved in travelling to and from their geographically isolated outpost. As a result, hasty revisions had to be made to the fixture list, and to ensure that all teams in the two pools played the same number of matches, one pair of sides – as it happened, Boland and Easterns – were obliged to meet each other twice during the season. Nor was that the end of the disruption; in February the match between Northern Cape and North West was stripped of its first-class status for a breach of ICC regulations regarding full substitutes. It still counted in the competition table, but North West lost all the points won in the game. As the match was not rated as first-class, its scorecard is not included in this part of the Annual ; it is printed separately on page 703. Eastern Province (narrowly) and Northerns (more comfortably) won their respective pools in this competition. The final between them was drawn, and so the title was shared.  Over the season as a whole, two batsmen aggregated over a thousand runs: Keegan Petersen (Knights and Northern Cape) with 1263 runs at 57.40, and Edward Moore (Warriors and Eastern Province), whose tally of 1590 runs at 56.78 was just 52 runs short of the record for a South African player in a domestic season. Duanne Olivier, with 58 wickets at 17.94 for Knights and the national side, was the season’s leading wicket-taker. Three other bowlers took over fifty wickets.