Gideon Haigh's Sunday Age article echoes my own concerns with the compromises made to the (in)vested interests influencing world cricket.
Cancellation of the Zimbabwe cricket Tests offers only a small fig-leaf to cover a large embarrassment, writes Gideon Haigh.
George Bernard Shaw once said that an Englishman thought he was moral when he was simply feeling uncomfortable. The same, increasingly, seems to apply to our sportsmen and sporting administrators. How else to explain how a team of Australian cricketers, queasily conscious of the dubiousness of the honour, are guests of Robert Mugabe.
Sport has hardly been declared morality-free. We have furious, foam-flecked debates about matters that it would be flattery to call trivial: whether James Hird should have dissed an umpire, whether Sam Newman should be permitted in public without taking his medication. We nonetheless stumbled into Zimbabwe claiming heavy hearts and admitting utter confusion, while still mouthing the piety that "it's only a game of cricket" - to quote Adam Gilchrist.
Gilchrist's baffled column in The Age last week is perhaps the most telling artefact of this sorry affair, having recourse in discussion of Zimbabwe's plight to phrases such as "alleged heartache" and "reported suffering"; one awaits references to "apparent bombings" in Iraq and "rumoured detention" of asylum seekers. Zimbabwe's 11th-hour cancellation of the two-Test series provides only a very small fig-leaf to cover a very large embarrassment.
It should be clear that our cricketers found themselves in Harare not because they particularly wanted to be, or to further cricket's good name, or even because they were expecting a good game - quite the contrary, because the internal exile of the country's (mainly white) first XI has left a ragged (mainly black) second XI in its place, a catchweight contest had been expected.
Instead, they were there because of the consequences of their not going. Swingeing fines and a costly suspension awaited those member countries of the International Cricket Council breaching contractual undertakings to tour others; time will tell how it deals with those who rescind invitations. Cricket Australia described the exercise as "a box we have to tick". Boxes are an important cricket accessory, but not usually in this respect. It was a dismal auspice for a cricket tour.
This being Australia, from where the rest of the world is viewed as through the wrong end of a telescope, there has been precious little information about Zimbabwe's benightedness as a nation.
Free speech and fair elections are things of the past there; dissent is ruthlessly crushed by means from expropriation to execution. By every conventional measure, the country is sliding backwards. Life expectancy is lower than in 1960. Two-thirds of its population is on the brink of famine or "food-insecure", despite three-quarters of the country's grain already coming from the World Food Program. About three million of its people have fled, mostly to South Africa. The economy has contracted for four consecutive years. Inflation runs into hundreds of per cent, unemployment is at about 50 per cent. Nor are these acts of God; they are acts of Mugabe's corrupt, despotic and increasingly desperate regime in no more than a handful of years.
It was reasonably pointed out that we play sport against countries that are not exactly democratic fashion plates. What made this tour farcical, however, was the way Mugabe's ZANU-PF party has so unceremoniously wrested control of the Zimbabwean Cricket Union in the past few years, populating it with cronies, politicising its management and selection processes, and turning it into a vehicle for propaganda and personal aggrandisement.
Zimbabwe cricket's travails have hardly been secret. Since 2000, 20 leading players have left Zimbabwe prematurely, including Neil Johnson, Murray Goodwin, Andy Flower and Henry Olonga. The rest, courageously, held their peace until their captain, Heath Streak, made a private protest about various recent selections that on April 2 earned him the sack; they were then sacked for supporting him.
This was depicted to the world as a matter of race, which has a way of making liberal consciences quail. But what ZANU-PF has wrought in Zimbabwe cricket has been only marginally about the empowerment of black countrymen, or toppling a final graven idol of colonialism.
As with so much of the Mugabe "revolution", it has been about party apparatchiks seeking stature and another exchequer to raid amid encircling chaos. Remarkably, 12 members of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union and their partners managed to visit Australia during Zimbabwe's tour last season, all expenses defrayed - remarkably because the union struggles to keep a viable first-class cricket structure going in Zimbabwe. We should not only never have set foot in Zimbabwe; we should never have come close.
Such debate as there was about the advisability of Australia's tour, alas, was crushingly disappointing. Apologists ran the tired line that politics and sport should not mix; like it or not, they do, time and again, and it is the cricket union that has in this instance done the mixing. A counter-argument was that cheap runs and easy wickets on offer endangered the sanctity of cricket statistics, as though recalcitrant scorers might ignite an auto-da-fe fuelled by Wisdens.
It is strange to recall that cricket was once supersaturated with morality - sometimes to the point of nausea. These days, professional athletes are not expected to think about anything more than their sport, or at a pinch distinguish between sunglass sponsors or choose which nightclub to patronise. "The bottom line for me is that we are cricketers," wrote Ricky Ponting in his most recent book. "Our job is to play cricket."
Curiously, when it suits them, athletes love cloaking themselves in the flag, proclaiming the patriotic pride they derive from representing their countries - and we love it when they do.
Hundreds of millions of Indians and Pakistanis who revelled in their countries' recent Test series did not think they were watching 22 men doing their jobs. If Zimbabwe cricket were merely a place of work, ZANU-PF would never have coveted its control. Professional athletes should be careful about drawing too much attention to that "bottom line", lest they be taken at their word.
For here lies, for sport, perhaps this fiasco's most troubling dimension: not merely that moral arguments no longer have traction, but that they seem to have been supplanted by commercial considerations.
For the past seven weeks, the International Cricket Council has kept an incriminating silence, save for one ill-aimed volley from president Ehsan Mani on 7 May: "If the rebels believe that walking out will result in other countries interfering in Zimbabwean cricket, I think that they have been very badly advised." A strange world this when players sacked and expelled become "rebels" who are "walking out".
Then, on 18 May, after the cricket union had refused to meet his chief executive, Mani foreshadowed the meeting of the International Cricket Council's executive board, whose threat to the tour's standing finally precipitated its cancellation.
"It's up to the directors to determine if these matches should have Test status or not and to exercise their judgement as to what course of action best protects the integrity of the international game," he said.
V.V.S. Laxman could not have executed a glide more effortless.
One moment the ICC could not be "interfering in Zimbabwean cricket"; the next it had to protect "the integrity of the international game". For "integrity", though, read "value of the franchise".
In June 2000, the council signed a seven-year, $US550 million ($785 million) deal for the broadcasting of international cricket withGlobal Cricket Corporation,now an arm of News Corporation.
But Test matches in which teams declare at 3-713 - as Sri Lanka recently did against the new Zimbabwe - and one-day matches in which teams are routed for 35 - as the new Zimbabwe was recently against Sri Lanka - scarcely enrich cricket's commercial cachet.
It's unlikely Rupert Murdoch himself has been on the phone; more probably - like so many editors - the ICC has simply uncannily anticipated his concerns.
This is what happens when it becomes too vexing to distinguish right from wrong, being moral from feeling uncomfortable: money makes the decision for you.
Slightly unfair to Adam Gilchrist who, afterall, is merely mouthing an administrator's script. Not forgetting that in all probability Gilly's an adherant of the Ian Hunter school of clich� -- "Once bitten, twice shy".
Never the less, Gilly's platitudes are an obvious sign of the unhealthy compromises gnawing away at the heart of world cricket.
PS: Just noting down "swinge" in the AGB glossary of odd looking words.
Dear Sir,
My name is Zanib Jabeen and I live in the heart city of Pakistan (Lahore) but in a very backward area of Lahore. My age is 17 and I am studying in class 12.
Sir the purpose of writing to you is that I am giving below please read that carefully
1- Sir I think you already know that cricket is developing now very fast and interesting so that lot of people like cricket very much and you can not imagine that in our country people are very much crazy for play and watch cricket but un fortunately we have not much facilities to play proper cricket and also analyze cricket but Sir I am sure if the ICC gives them the facilities and encourage them they will do extra ordinary for the development of cricket.
2- So Sir I am also very crazy spectator of cricket Sir I can also analyze cricket and Sir I have also the knowledge and information of cricket Sir you can not imagine that I have how many interest and craze for cricket but as you know that we belong to a very poor country that’s the reasons I can not do something for cricket and respected Sir there is another of that is lack of appreciation from my home and my papa who likes old ideas and customs and he did not appreciate me but he discourages me because I like cricket he said to me that do not waste your time in watching and analyze cricket you can not do any thing for cricket you have to read lot more and not to waste time for cricket I think that he feels that I am mad and crazy for cricket and I have no senses that’s the reason we have no understanding with our father.
3- Sir in the cricket field I like the Australian cricket team and I try to don’t miss any match of Australia you I think I am the only person who likes the Australian cricket very much and that you cant imagine where my craze is going Sir have the facts and figures of current Australian players and also Sir lot more information of Australian cricket Sir I really really want to do something for the development for cricket and specially for Australia its not enough Sir I like so much as a country Australia and I want to visit Australia but Sir unfortunately I belong to a very poor family and I can not afford to visit Australia with my own money so I heartily request you to plz plz plz Sir do something for me In this cause Sir I offer you to surely check my knowledge and information about cricket and specially Australian cricket so that I will be in that position to prove myself Sir I want to prove myself and prove in front of my parents that I am the girl who can do something for the development of cricket Sir its not wrong that cricket is my passion and life and everything and Respected Sir, I want to devote my whole and complete life for cricket , but Sir I have written many letters to Australia but unfortunately no one gave me the positive answer Sir you can just that , it’s a way to denied the talented and passionful people? What do you think it’s good? I love Australian cricket and you have no response for me. Please tell me as it is right or wrong? Please I request you to give me the positive response if you want to respect and use the talented people and I am not joking Sir cricket is my passion and without it I cant live.
4- I hope you will understand and will gave me the positive response as soon as possible and will call me to Australia and use my talent of cricket and also do something for the development of Australian cricket and also for cricket all over the world.
My phone number is
92-42-0333-4293753
Posted by: zanib | 11 June 2004 at 15:34