Cricket gets some proper leadership at last
Jul 7 2008 by Pat Murphy
'Cricket civilises people. I want everyone in Zimbabwe to play cricket. I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen’. Robert Mugabe, 1983.
‘The tragic failure of leadership’. Nelson Mandela on the political situation in Zimbabwe, July 2008.
Mercifully, a great man’s opinion has proved more decisive than the rantings of a malevolent despot and Zimbabwe have at last encountered hostility from world cricket’s rulers, the International Cricket Council.
So England can go ahead with staging next year’s World Twenty 20 tournament, without Zimbabwe. But if it hadn’t been for the moral leadership of Mandela which stiffened South Africa’s resistance, Zimbabwe would have survived the vote.
Horse-trading was inevitable when the ICC convened in Dubai last week. Pakistan look like securing England’s approval for staging the Champions’ Trophy this autumn amid security fears, while India is looking to England for accommodation over the vexed issue of the rival Indian Cricket league and Indian Premier League competitions.
And India and England still have serious disagreements about the proposed Champions’ League, involving eight teams from four countries contesting a Twenty 20 competition for enormous sums of money.
England don’t like the way that India are trying to poach our top players for the IPL and there are massive battles ahead between the two major powerbrokers of international cricket.
The game is changing forever before our very eyes. But at least the necessity for deals has concentrated minds over Zimbabwe. It’s a disgrace that the ICC did nothing about this for the past decade and a farce that Zimbabwe will still get the same amount of money per year as full members despite possessing official pariah status. And Zimbabwe will still be allowed to play one-day internationals. Their players are as useless in that form as they are in Tests, which they haven’t played since 2005.
Laughably, the India delegates tried to suggest that sport and politics shouldn’t mix while England, who are still pressing for Zimbabwe’s expulsion from the ICC, must be happy that at least they won the right to keep them away from next summer’s jamboree.
At last England’s cricketers, administrators and politicians talked as one. There were no more weasel words from the Government about wishing the ECB to make the crucial decision while hinting broadly what they really wanted. For the first time since 1970, when the South Africans’ tour to this country was cancelled, our politicians took the lead and the ECB deserves credit for subtle and consistent lobbying, avoiding counter-productive grandstanding.
But we’ll never know how the Dubai voting would have gone if Nelson Mandela hadn’t shown such timely moral leadership.
His authority dwarfs the squalid compromising of so many lickspittles in the ICC.
