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Jacques Rudolph was probably being excessively colourful when he once referred to Benonis Willowmoore Park as varkpan. Translated from the Afrikaans, varkpan literally means pig tray in English. A generation of young white South African men conscripted during the 1980s knows them well, because varkpans were the compartmentalised stainless steel trays into which your daily meals were slopped. They are symbols of an age, much like lockers and infantry browns. To the male South African mind they say much about the exercise of arbitrary power, meaninglessness and fear. They are anything but neutral.Call me perverse, but contrary to Rudolphs deep love of the place, Ive always liked Willowmoore Park. I like the fact that that if you screw your neck around from the far corner of the ground and look east, you can see Benonis famous mine dump, its yellow sands quietly blowing away in the spring winds.I like the fact that the western grandstand probably dates back from the 1930s, and if you look into the underside of the roof you can see a crazy quilt of supporting girders, many of which look strangely superfluous, and so give an impression of post-Edwardian vanity. Its like looking into another way of seeing the world - or another mind - and its pricelessly and utterly charming.The ground even used to have a beautiful arch at its main entrance, with the words Willowmoore Park suspended over your head in red art-deco letters. Upon visiting the ground last week, when Australia played Ireland in an ODI, I noticed to my disappointment that one couldnt see the letters anymore because they had been blocked out by a massive sign for Sahara computers. Such is the authorities approach to cricket heritage.Built in the 1920s on a drained marsh - or vlei in Afrikaans - the ground is so called because willows used to line one side of the field, and one of Benonis founding fathers was a man called Moore. It hosted pretty much everything in the early days. Athletics was a regular feature, and in 1948, Denis Compton toyed with the North Eastern Transvaal bowling by taking 300 runs off them in just over three hours. Having scored 42 fours and five sixes, his hair was probably perfectly in place when he strode back to the pavilion for a cup of tea and a fag.Comptons Arsenal never played at varkpan, but the following decade saw a variety of visiting English football teams: Newcastle United, Wolves, and Bolton Wanderers. With big Scottish and English immigrant populations working on the mines, football was big in these parts, but as gold yields lessened, so the sport faded.The local club was called Benoni FC, and at one point Denis Lindsay, the South African wicketkeeper-batsman of the 1960s, played as their goalkeeper. Denis was the son of Johnny Lindsay, who toured England with South Africa in 1947. When Johnny retired, he became the unofficial Willowmoore Park groundsman and designed the floodlights that remain today. The concrete pylons on which the lights are supported arent beautiful, but they are solid and durable, much like the stock from which North Eastern Transvaal traditionally drew their players. Benoni tracks have always had a reputation for being sporty, partly because the water table is so close to the grounds surface. The story is told of a match in 1968 when Denis Lindsay was playing alongside Hylton Ackerman, Jackie Botten and Jim Presdee for North Eastern Transvaal against visiting Eastern Province. The men from Port Elizabeth had Peter Pollock, Alan Hector and Sibley McAdam in their midst, and so the hosts were quietly relieved when it started raining.It rained so torrentially that one afternoon both teams took themselves off to the local cinema to watch The Dirty Dozen, with Lee Marvin, Telly Savalas and Charles Bronson. Suddenly this message comes across the bottom of the screen, Peter Barrable, who played for North Eastern Transvaal in the match, once told me. Will the cricketers please return to the ground? Play is about to begin.Despite the reservations of Peter van der Merwe, the EP skipper, the match started, with Province being bowled out for 53 and the hosts cobbling together 41. In the second innings, I remember taking Peter Pollock on the body for an hour - I was black and blue, said Barrable.Although Willowmoore Park is a secondary ground, there is talk in South African cricket circles of the franchise system being expanded in the 2017-18 season. In all likelihood that would mean a team of their own for Easterns, which is good news for one of the largest urban provinces in the country, with an unusually large black cricket-playing population. I cant see the current system going up [from six] to eight teams, said a local administrator, so the logical next step is to shoot it up to 12. That way we can keep some of the kids who are heading to England and New Zealand but also give more opportunities to players of colour. Its a win-win at that level. The only problem is does it dilute our first-class competition too much? Balenciaga Ireland Store . LOUIS -- Theres no telling how these wacky World Series games will end. Cheap Balenciaga Trainers Ireland . -- The Magic have their first victory of the new year. http://www.balenciagaoutletireland.com/ . Shot outdoors against the stunning backdrop of Banff, Alta., the networks 30-minute original production airs tonight at 8pm et/5pm pt on TSN2. The four All-Star teams will play for $100,000 in prize money during TSNs annual skins game, airing live this weekend on TSN from The Fenlands Banff Recreation Centre. Balenciaga Outlet Ireland . Anthony Davis had 31 points and 17 rebounds in his seventh straight game with more than 20 points, but that was only enough to keep the Pelicans competitive into the final minutes. Andrew Bogut had 10 points and 15 rebounds for Golden State, which rebounded from a loss a night earlier in Oklahoma City and snapped a two-game skid. Balenciaga Trainers Buy Online Ireland . The nimble-footed quarterback got his wish, dashing through the snow and a weary defence all the way into the NCAA record book. An ongoing referendum is taking place in America, a trial in which we, the people, seem to be both plaintiff and defendant. The same questions are being asked that have always been asked, especially in an election year, but the consequences of those answers no longer seem to result merely in a difference of opinion. Today, they either confirm that our people, institutions and beliefs are the allies we thought them to be, or they serve as sudden, irreparable proof that our friends and neighbors were never quite friends or neighbors. We assumed too much about the progress we thought we made, believed we were closer than we actually were.San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick didnt start this referendum, but he has become, like Crispus Attucks or Curt Flood or Rodney King, the flashpoint of a reckoning much larger than himself and long overdue. He stood up by kneeling down, and not only has he yet to move, but others -- many black men and at least one white woman, soccer player Megan Rapinoe -- are now kneeling with him.These are the gestures we say we respect: the tough, uncompromising American virtue of commitment and conviction, of making it plain in the face of opposition and being right. Adam Jones, the brilliant Baltimore Orioles center fielder, also made it plain that baseball, the original civil rights sport with the deepest connection to the American story of sports and social justice, wont willingly be one of the fronts where the battle is fought. Baseball, Jones said, is not the black-dominated world of football or basketball, saying that the game lacks the untouchable wealth of black superstar power, and even a reputable volume of rank and file for it to support a similar form of protest. In demographic and attitude, Jones said baseball is a white mans game.If the current pattern of behavior toward the truth applies, Jones will suffer the type of misdirection and distortion that Kaepernick has experienced. The substance of his words will be mauled, chewed and twisted beyond recognition, in ways like how tennis players John Isner and Ryan Harrison, neither of whom had uttered a single word of knowledge about the history of police-community relations, of African-American history in baseball or otherwise, now feel emboldened to talk while saying nothing, to pander to the public about just how dedicated they are to patriotism, whatever that means. Jones will have to listen to the wounded protestations from baseball executives, colleagues and writers who, faced with the impossible task of refuting him, will instead simply express disappointment or outrage at his comments. In this case, patriotism, disappointment or outrage should mean knowing what one is talking about.Instead, the baseball industry has essentially confirmed Jones suspicions through a deafening silence of incuriosity that further severs it from its groundbreaking past, and the truth of the matter is sinking into the soil: Baseball is a white mans game, and is so by the specific design of the people who run it. In a country full of world-class black athletes, baseball cannot seem to attract many. Nothing Jones said is statistically, factually or anecdotally remarkable except for that he took the remarkable step of actually saying it.Major League Baseball is 8 percent African-American and more than 30 percent Latino, signed in large numbers for pennies on the dollar. Economically, Latino players are treated as far more disposable than Americans or players from the Asian market, and have been treated with second-class attitudes for just as long.Baseball has never been very good at evolution or change. The game has two black managers, no black owners and one black general manager. It has one Latino owner, no Latino managers and one Latino general manager. Only within the past two years has Major League Baseball mandated that clubs hire actual professional translators instead of using the backup sshortstop to speak English for Chicago Cubs closer Aroldis Chapman.ddddddddddddts all right there, Red Sox star David Ortiz told me. The opportunities, they speak for themselves. Compare the number of Latinos with the number of Latino managers, you know what Im saying? Sometimes I get so frustrated about it. But you cant wait for anyone to give you something. Sometimes I tell the young guys, Be smart. Save, because there wont be anything here for you when its done. Make as much money as you can in the game, and get your black ass out.?The game has cultivated the front-office posture of a Fortune 500 company, placing another barrier to advancement for people of color by preferring young, often unproven Ivy League talent over people of color who have deep institutional knowledge of how baseball works and is played but now lack the graduate degrees that have become the new prerequisite. This undermines any chance that veteran baseball people will be promoted, as they once hoped, into the front office. Baseballs front offices dont have many black or Latino executives in their upper reaches because, simply, they dont want any enough to actually try to compete for them.Since the 1950s, baseball has had at least a trio of African-American players who were Mount Rushmore-level Hall of Fame players. No such trio exists today, and the last time one did was likely the late 1990s, when Barry Bonds, Frank Thomas and Ken Griffey Jr. were all considered, at one point, the best player in the game. That was nearly 20 years ago.Jones critique of his industry is particularly withering because of the games lineage. Baseballs whiteness in 2016 is so starkly in contrast to baseballs postwar roots, where not only did the giants of the game like Jackie Robinson, Henry Aaron and Willie Mays share its face along with Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax, but also because it was in baseball where the Kaepernick moments occurred, from Robinsons fighting for integrated hotels to Aaron and the Braves demanding integrated seating as a condition for moving from Milwaukee to Atlanta. The black heritage has disappeared along with its progeny.During its most integrated, baseball has never known quite what to do with its black players, or any players, for that matter. The game is rooted in its anachronisms. Even its coded language -- play the game the right way -- repels the stylish flairs of a modern player, kids raised in a time of selfies and TV highlights. Unlike football and basketball, which have better adapted to the people who play, making it more attractive to younger players, baseball forces its strict, traditional culture on kids born in the 1990s and 2000s. Griffey took batting practice with his hat on backward, and the old guard treated it as if he had sworn in church.These rickety old conventions were problematic in attracting black talent long before Ferguson, but the overlay of explosive national politics only exposes the game and buttresses Jones point further. Last month, I asked Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia whether he thought he expected baseball to follow in the steps of LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony in the NBA. No, he said. You cant do that in this sport.Jones spoke. Now it is baseballs turn. The clichés of family and going to war out there will be tested in a time of national protest -- not only by the Orioles trying to catch Boston and Toronto in the American League East but also by the real stuff in the clubhouse, of sitting side by side with a star teammate eight months a year, during the most polarizing time in a generation, knowing how one of your family members thinks, especially in Baltimore where Freddie Gray died in police custody a year ago. And with all of that, deciding whether to reach out and say something. Or continue to say nothing. ' ' '