| |
|
It's a toughie, right enough. Myself, I can't see the point to cricket but it is hugely popular around the world. I remember the ecstasy on the streets when India beat Pakistan in a match once. Fireworks, drums, giddy rejoicing, big smiles everywhere.
On the one hand, every individual is responsible for their actions and for having truck with a nation that's an international pariah for whatever reason. And, as captain, Hussain has an extra responsibility to guide his men perhaps. I think he's doing that by making their difficulties over the issue clear and public and asking the fat cats running the whole show to shoulder their responsibilities.
Sporting links with the bigger world can be a force for good in a nation as tightly controlled and insular as Zimbabwe and I can remember encouraging examples such as Jesse Owens putting two fingers to the Nazis racial theories at the Berlin Olympics. And the Brits appeared and competed in the Moscow Olympics despite the US refusing to. Won some medals for once with the competition reduced. Perhaps that played some part in the USSR's incipient perestroika.
I think, in sum, that sport should be capable of being above politics in some sense and that yet the boycott of South Africa for all those years did, I think, throw a big spanner in their works. So it's either above politics or it isn't and since it has often, clearly and recently, not been seen to be above politics, they shouldn't go. I wouldn't.
If they do, they should take Peter Tatchell as chief cheerleader, to encourage brave and direct interaction with Mugabe and his henchmen. |
|
|
