CRICKET
Peter Robinson
A poll conducted by the News24 website recently called for South Africa’s cricket tour to Zimbabwe next month to be cancelled and, what’s more, for a full range of sanctions to be slapped on Big, Bad Bob as quickly as possible.
The first point, of course, is that Internet polls are famously unreliable. News24 admits that its own poll is unscientific and the reason for this is that the respondents tend to be a group of, usually, like-minded people.
Nevertheless, the weight of the poll result more than 80% of more than 1 000 respondents prompted News24 to get on to the United Cricket Board (UCB) about it. UCB spokesperson Bronwyn Wilkinson played a dead bat to the query, reiterating the UCB’s position that only instructions from the South African government or the Zimbabwe cricket authorities would prompt it to reconsider going ahead with the tour unless the players’ safety were threatened.
As things stand, there is no indication that the South African team will be in any danger in Zimbabwe next month. Violence has tended to be restricted to rural areas and as much as President Robert Mugabe has torn up the Zimbabwe Constitution in an attempt to stay in power, it seems most unlikely that Shaun Pollock and his team would witness, let alone been subject to, any violence.
There are two basic arguments for South Africa to press ahead with the tour. The first is that it would be daft for the UCB to contradict South African government policy whether it, the readers of News24 or anyone else agrees with this policy or not.
In recent weeks both the president of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union, Peter Chingoka, and, more significantly, the leader of the Zimbabwe opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai, have appealed for the tour to go ahead.
Even if South Africa and England (who are due in Zimbabwe later this year) pulled out, it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to Mugabe.
Secondly, there is a very real prospect that if South Africa and England cancelled, Zimbabwe cricket might go into a financial tailspin from which it could never recover. The game struggles to survive in Zimbabwe and is almost completely dependent on the revenue generated by the sale of television rights.
There’s a third point, too. Should the UCB, or any sporting body, be in the business of making political or diplomatic points or allowing itself to be used for this purpose? Let’s turn this one around. It would be fascinating to know, if it were possible to transport the News24 respondents back 15 years, how many of them were fully behind the sports boycott of South Africa. What’s that? Don’t mix politics and sport? Oh, all right then.
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa