Mark Boucher has apologised, but not before blaming everyone else for his racist actions and accusing everyone at the SJN hearings of lying.
SO PROTEAS coach Mark Boucher gave the most sorry attempt at an apology for calling former teammate Paul Adams “brown sh!t” this week.
After threatening to take the matter of Adams’ testimony at Cricket South Africa’s Social Justice and Nation-building hearings to court, Boucher said sorry.
But not before blaming everyone else for his racist actions and accusing everyone at the hearings of lying. Boucher said he and his teammates were naive when they singled out Adams.
And that would have been good enough for me.
A simple “I’m sorry. It was hurtful and I know better now” would have been short and sweet. And he could have gone further and said that in his Proteas team, he would make sure that no one ever felt unwelcome in the national team on his watch.
But unfortunately that is beyond Mark Boucher.
Instead he reckons that he and his teammates were not told by CSA how to treat their teammates of colour.
Imagine having to be told by your boss not to a racist!
Imagine that someone has to tell you that in a democratic South Africa, it’s not OK to be racist. Imagine that you have to be reminded that calling someone “brown sh!It” is not the decent thing to do?
Whether he was the first person in the team to give Adams that racist name or not doesn’t matter. You are responsible for your actions, my man.
And if you can’t own up without lawyering up, then we have a problem here boeta.
I said before that Boucher must go if he can’t muster an apology. Judging by this sorry attempt, I believe that his position is untenable and his BFF Biff needs to give him the finger.
All of this happened in the same week as assistant coach Enoch Nkwe resigned from his assistant coach position, citing team culture issues.
A TimesLive report claims the former team director is unhappy at not having his contributions valued and that he is just “a cones boy”.
It’s not a huge stretch of the imagination to see Nkwe and Boucher were not seeing eye to eye.
And while I’m not going to put this down to racism, don’t be surprised if Boucher has to lawyer up over this issue again.
CSA and Graeme Smith should save themselves some blame and get the coach a taxi home.
