Draft: The Quotea Draft

[Aislabie]

but in this draft, if you said “pick an all time SA team according to modern quota” and there was no draft, just my XI, I don’t know who I’d end up with, because a change here means your quota is out so that leads to 2 more changes and oh hang on I haven’t put in Faulkner and oh hang on that’s the quota gone again and wait a minute, didn’t I start with Richards and Cook opening, how have I got Smith and Goddard and hang on, if I use Rabada instead of Steyn I can put in Rice over Amla and...

Exactly this - it's an absolutely impossible puzzle I think, and that's part of the infuriating beauty of it. I honestly haven't got a clue where I'd start picking an all-time South African XI with modern quotas because the pieces are almost impossible to fit together.

There are two approaches - do you pick the best players for the quota slots and then fit non-quota legends around them? Or do you pick your first five or six players with complete disregard for quotas and then work backwards? Buggered if I know, but they create almost diametrically opposite teams:

Quotas first	Quotas last
Graeme Smith	Barry Richards
Herschelle Gibbs	Herschelle Gibbs
Hashim Amla	Jacques Kallis
Graeme Pollock	Andy Flower
Aubrey Faulkner	Aubrey Faulkner
Basil D'Oliveira	Ashwell Prince
Quinton de Kock	Mike Procter
Mike Procter	Haroon Lorgat
Khaya Majola	Khaya Majola
Vincent Barnes	Vincent Barnes
Makhaya Ntini	Makhaya Ntini

It's so weird - on one side you end up with a team that misses out Kallis and Richards, on the other you have a team that misses out Amla. There's seemingly no right answer to this

A compromise team:

Barry Richards
Herschelle Gibbs
Hashim Amla
Graeme Pollock
Jacques Kallis
Aubrey Faulkner
Basil D'Oliveira
Mike Procter
Thami Tsolikile
Khaya Majola
Vincent Barnes

The hardest bit there was choosing a captain - you probably end up with either Amla (who famously hated it) or Majola. And even then you end up picking Thami Tsolikile as your all-time South African wicket-keeper which is... dodgy