The long-suffering, endlessly broke SABC has taken an expensive step onto the cricket pitch in an attempt to make the pubcaster relevant again when it comes to sporting broadcast rights.
The SABC has signed a deal with Cricket South Africa for the exclusive broadcast rights to the CSA's new T20 tournament, now called the T20 Cricket League.
The name changed suddenly and overnight from the T20 Global League, after months of behind-the-scenes politics involving SuperSport, the CSA, broadcast rights and rich tournament investors who eventually had enough of everyone's babying around.
For the full fiasco, take a look at this timeline on Cricinfo here:
CSA relaunch T20 league in partnership with state-owned broadcaster SABC.
The SABC moved in after this and according to their press release, they're hoping the event "will assist the SABC to regain its credibility and meet its business objective of attracting audiences and revenue."
The truth is that the CSA needs the SABC as much as the SABC needs the tournament because it has to attract as many eyeballs as it can so its best move is to be on public TV.
It's in desperate need of credibility too which means both parties need to pull it off for the wellbeing of South Africa's citizens.
Will they succeed?
Let's hope so. Our gripe is with the name. It's mindboggling that after months of working on the tournament, all they could come up with is the unimaginative name of T20 Cricket League.
Other countries have exciting names like the IPL in India or the Big Bash in Australia, which gives them a strong sense of identity whereas Cricket League could mean anything or be anywhere which makes it extremely blah!
Couldn't they have come up with something to represent the African continent or South Africa??
They also don't have a logo yet. They had one for the Global League but nothing for the Cricket League so they better get cracking
The tournament starts in November and will air on SABC3.