It was around 2013/2014 that school cricket quality dramatically fell away. Prior to that there were a number of very good schoolboys. That I lay firmly on ZC's doorstep.
Even though club cricket was all but dead by then, there were still plenty of really good white kids enjoying cricket and vying for age group sides. When reality set in that they were competing for perhaps 2 or 3 spots max they realised the full futility of it. Plus ZC stopped touring to SA because somebody had stolen all the mula. The skullduggery I've witnessed is numbing. There's a long list of both black and white.
That coincided with a huge resurgence of water polo and schools cutting back dramatically on fixtures, particularly in the third term. Mostly because kids were cramming for vital exams with tutors because the quality of teaching has gone to hell. Kills me when these big schools proudly post their exam results yet 90% of their students were groomed for exams by tutors
In my day you could fail O levels as many times as you liked. Guys stayed at school for an extra year or two if the school was going to tour
You'd leave when you had kids to support.
There was a time when white buy-in was vital for success and it didnt happen. Now the numbers are so few and the interest so little that that bird has long since flown. It's now up to the black folk to rebuild and they're currently not up to the task. Most of that is due to a broken economy and systems, which was also inherited mostly intact, by the way.
It's hard to find excuses, but people manage.
If they can't fix soccer, the national sport, cricket has no chance. First step is to own your failures. Nobody really wants to fix anything, merely profit from it.
Plus of course the number of competitive schools has plummeted from about 20 down to half a dozen.
In hindsight it was basically The Perfect Storm of destruction. Its decades to build something valuable and maybe 2 years to irretrievably mess it up.
It's not just cricket, it's every single sport in this country that has gone straight down the toilet through horrific mismanagement, wholesale theft and unmitigated racism under the ridiculous guise of misguided quota, spite, venom, call it what you like. Its nothing new of course, been going on from the get go, but the new bosses took it to another level.
Somewhere along the line kids have gotten soft with helicopter parents hovering around making sure their little darlings get shit they haven't earned or deserved as well. I'm talking not just the white community here either.
I once saw a young Prosper Utseya in a broken heap because he got denied a rightful spot in the u19 side. It puts shit on your liver for sure. The trick is to fix it rather than return the favor. Takes a good man to do that, and it's a commodity we are short of across the board.
My era of schoolboy rugby used to run England schools very close. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
It's possible to slowly do some limited damage control and repair through commitment, fairness and transparency, but we'd never get even half way to what we had before... in any sport!! I'm ye to see anyone make a genuine meaningful attempt, it's all window dressing with an eye on the main prize which is unfortunately money. What happened to administrators that worked for free for the love of the game?