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Zimbabwe situation puts ICC in a spot
This weekend the Prime Ministers of Britain and Australia have pleaded with their countries' cricketers not to travel to Zimbabwe for the World Cup.
The International Cricket Council has replied that it must fulfil its contracts and that it is not its decision to judge which country is right and wrong. "We are not a political organisation,'' said its president Malcolm Gray, missing the point.
But he, and Tim Lamb, chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, are right to point out that such a decision could cost the game millions of dollars in lost revenue from sponsors and television.
In the years when apartheid policies ruled South Africa cricket played a small part — often unwillingly since they had years of contact with the rulers of the game there — in bringing about change.
MCC, which declined to bow to the wishes of the government in Pretoria by leaving coloured player, Basil D'Oliveira, out of its touring party in 1969, showed enormous strength, particularly since many of that club's members had friends and relatives in South Africa and some sympathy with that country's solution to its mixed race problems.
ICC faces a different concern. It has been told by its own investigators that there is no danger to the players and that the matches will go off without incident.
Its only reason for staying out of Zimbabwe is a moral reason; a form of protest against the policies of the Mugabe government whose thugs have evicted white settlers from farms and attempted to coerce voters at the polls.
Millions of Zimbabweans will not care whether cricket is played in Harare and Bulawayo; their own day-to-day circumstances are too harsh for them to worry about a pastime however important that may seem to a privileged few.
President Mugabe is also an enthusiast for the game. I met him, shook his hand, exchanged a few words with him at Harare Cricket Club during the England tour in 1997; he seemed in those few seconds to be a nice enough chap.
But a few yards down the road was his house, not to be approached since armed guards might suspect that the curious passer-by had evil intentions and shoot him dead. I suspect Mugabe is unlikely to allow any danger to come close to the cricketers even if the opposition stages demonstrations at the World Cup games.
Incidents on the cricket grounds would avail him nothing and might even harm his cause. At the same time, it is foolish of ICC to think that it can turn a blind eye to the happenings in Zimbabwe.
Politicians, an untrustworthy lot, will not allow it. They will exploit the popularity of the game, use it for their own ends and then turn their attention to whatever else grabs the headlines.
Mrs. Thatcher told the athletes she did not want them to go to Moscow for the Olympics in 1980; they went without any consequences. The Labour government of the mid-1970s advised MCC to ignore South Africa and it did with long-term results that have brought about the present climate in that beautiful, troubled land.
Perhaps all ICC can do is to learn a lesson from this weekend in which the politicians have set the agenda and sat back to watch the resultant squabbling.
David Graveney, chairman of the England selectors, has exposed himself to ridicule by saying that if he was a cricketer still he would not go to Zimbabwe. He managed a rebel team to South Africa in 1989 and was banned along with the rest of the team. His masters at Lord's are furious that he has made them look foolish.
The only sense in a weekend of bickering and shallow thought has come from Nasser Hussain, a son of Madras, now Chennai, and always a city noted for clear thinking. "This is too important a subject too be decided by players,'' he says. Correct. It is one to be settled by ICC which has said it will honour its contracts. And so it should. In a mad, mad world, it is the only possible course of action.
Ted Corbett
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