Eastern Province Cricket received a shot in the arm by being included in the eight-team first division of next season’s new domestic cricket structure unveiled by Cricket SA on Monday.
CSA board interim chair Stavros Nicolaou announced that EP, together with Boland, Free State, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal Coastal, North West, Northerns and Western Province, would make up the premier division of the two-tier domestic structure.
Eastern Cape neighbours Border, who missed out on a spot in the top division, will be one of the seven remaining teams who will make up the second tier, along with South Western Districts, Easterns, KZN Inland, Northern Cape, Limpopo and Mpumalanga.
These divisions will be valid for the 2021/2022 and 2022/2023 seasons, after which an automatic promotion/relegation system will be implemented.
Mark Williams, CEO of the soon-to-be-defunct Warriors franchise and the man seconded to lead EP’s sustainability strategy on a full-time basis, is relieved that high-performance cricket will return to the region under the new structure.
“If you consider how the bid has been structured and the implications of us not having a team in a top CSA league, there are huge consequences to the economy locally, cricket in the region and just maintaining our infrastructure,” Williams said.
Having anticipated the potential structural change of the domestic game, Williams said Eastern Province Cricket developed a commercial model in a bid to not only inform CSA about their future but also demonstrate their financial capability.
“The board took a few decisions, one being that when the time comes we need to be ready.
“We understood that commerciality and sustainability would be key for any winning bidder, so we developed a structure to ensure long-term sustainability and funding of the team, bearing in mind that in the past teams have been funded by CSA.
“For the last decade, St George’s Park has hosted the Warriors, which in itself gave us additional capabilities because we understood how high-performance cricket worked.
“Amid the difficult economy, I believe the Warriors did very well, so that capability resides on our doorstep here at St George’s.
“We have a high-performance coach as well as infrastructure which will help us manage.
“We want to structure ourselves in such a way that if the time came, we would have a brand which resides in the Eastern Cape,” he said.
The 8-7 divisional split was determined by a “bid process”, in which each member was evaluated based on performance, both current and historical, against defined evaluation criteria, as well as its strategic plan for running and sustaining a professional team within the new professional era at affiliate-member level.
Williams said having the Warriors based in the region made the transition of Eastern Province Cricket a lot easier, with most of the infrastructure to house a professional team already in place.
He said what happened on the field would be critical and developing players would be crucial to any team's success in the top division.
“One key criteria of the bid was how we develop the pipeline and one of our biggest challenges has been our players moving elsewhere and then other provinces get the benefit of it.
“Hopefully now the requirement would be that cricket is developed from the pipeline in the region,” he said.
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