Former Cricket South Africa (CSA) chief executive Jacques Faul says the game in the country has lost credibility and those in leadership positions must take responsibility for the mess.

Crisis-riddled CSA currently does not have a board after mass resignations a few days ago and sports minister Nathi Mthethwa has intervened to set up an interim task team.

“Stability and credibility are probably the two important things that must come back and it comes from sound leadership‚” said Faul, who is back at Northerns Cricket Union at SuperSport Park after a short stint as acting chief executive of CSA.

“The one thing that cricket has lost is credibility because people don’t trust us to do the right thing. I don’t think it will come back overnight‚ but it’s important that we have a very good interim committee that will start providing leadership and doing things for the right reasons.”

Faul said one of the lessons to be learnt from the problems at CSA is that people must have passion for the game and not only be interested in personal gain.

“One of the lessons we probably learn out of this is that you also have to love the game and have an understanding of sport and cricket‚" he said.

"It’s no need to have a great and professional CV but you are too far from the game. Maybe it is one of the things that we have learned out of this but cricket has been here before in 2012.

“But I don’t think it was this bad in 2012 to be fair. I think in 2012 we had a bit more of direction‚ there was less infighting but it's individuals who get it wrong. We probably took too long to get to this point‚ which was a concern‚ but we are here now and we have to move on.

"Hopefully, we get good people who are willing to serve cricket and they help the sport to get its credibility back. We messed up but we want to fix it and that’s important.”