The Caribbean dope-smoking affair was badly handled especially so soon after the Hansie Cronje scandal
Peter Robinson
One of the more fascinating aspects of South Africa’s tour of the Caribbean has been the condition of Herschelle Gibbs’s head. So clean-shaven on top as to resemble a hard-boiled egg, a fashionable scrub is on display lower down. It looks somehow as if Gibbs manages to get up every morning and put his head on upside down. Which figures.
Like it or not, Gibbs is central to the crisis of credibility that has enveloped South Africa, both on a personal level as a prodigious talent apparently determined to undersell itself and as a symbol of the muddled thinking that seems not only to have gripped the national team, but also the leadership of the United Cricket Board (UCB).
There have been attempts to fob off the dope-smoking in Antigua as being not serious enough to warrant the fuss. It has also been suggested, by no less a person than Craig Smith, the physiotherapist, de facto assistant manager and one of the culprits, that the real issue is how the affair became public.
To deal with the first point, there may well be an argument for the decriminalisation of dagga, but the Antigua affair is not the hook on which to hang it. The fact is that smoking dagga is illegal in Antigua and illegal in South Africa. The culprits were all representing their country, a position which carries both privilege and responsibility.
It is simply not an argument to suggest that because the incident happened in a hotel room that’s where it should have been left. If you accept this, then you accept that anything goes so long as no one finds out about it.
It has also been suggested that the matter was kept quiet to protect the reputations of the younger players. That’s a load of bollocks. You could use the same argument in the case of senior players with impeccable reputations, players who are in form, players who are out of form. It’s nonsense, pure and simple.
Then there is the question of the judgement exercised by the president and chief executive of the UCB, both of whom were apparently aware of the matter but chose to hush it up. This is where Gibbs comes into it again. By keeping quiet the officials effectively subverted the UCB’s own disciplinary procedures.
Gibbs was under a suspended sentence on April 10 when the offence was committed. Until now, well over a month later, no UCB disciplinary committee has been convened to consider the matter, neither in South Africa nor in the West Indies. Gibbs, meanwhile, has been allowed to carry on playing even as a three-match suspended sentence floated over his head.
What were the president and the CEO thinking? That if everything was kept under wraps it all might go quietly away? And if so, what kind of signal did they think they were sending to Gibbs and anyone else who might commit an offence in the future?
The point is that neither official has the mandate to decide who should be disciplined and when and where. There is machinery in place to deal with circumstances such as these and the duty of UCB officials, elected or appointed, is to set this machinery in motion.
The fact is that the image of South African cricket took a terrible hammering last year with the match-fixing scandal and this latest debacle only serves to suggest that beneath the well-scrubbed and shiny face of the national team, something very rotten might be squirming away.
To a considerable degree the efforts of Shaun Pollock as captain and the performances of the team over the past summer and in the West Indies have helped to restore public confidence in the game. But this latest incident undermines much of the good work that has been achieved on the field.
The handling of the whole affair seems to indicate that very few of the lessons from the match-fixing scandal have been learned. One of the most important is the danger of allowing the national team to exist in a self-contained cocoon, inside of which accepted loyalties and norms of behaviour can become dangerously distorted.
Team spirit can be a very fine asset, but in real life not all other considerations can and should be subsumed to the Great God “team spirit”. Disaster lies along that path.
In Smith’s indignant and self-justifying defence of the cover-up, he argued that it was simply “an isolated case, just like the others dealt with in the same manner on other tours that have not emerged for public laundering and consumption”. Really? Is there something else we should know?
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo (www.cricket.co.za)