Courageous cricket
MICHAEL HENDERSON
The cricket World Cup continues to rumble along, and should bring an Australian victoty this Sunday. It has been a poor competition: bloated, badly organised, disfigured by mutual mistrust and political stratagems, and lacking (overall) star quality. Furthermore, because it has been carried by satellite broadcasters, it has been ignored by most people in this country, including those who follow the game.
But the tournament has featured one story of genuine courage; nay, heroism. Henry Olonga, the black Zimbabwean fast bowler, retired from international cricket last week after his side were knocked out. Behind the scenes in East London, however, the real drama was being enacted. Olonga was spirited out of the ground by South African security officers, so that he would avoid capture by the thugs of Robert Mugabe's secret police, who had been sent to East London with the express purpose of smuggling him back across the border to face trial for treason. In Zimbabwe the punishment for treason is death. Olonga's act of treason, along with that of Andy Flower. a fellow international, was to wear a black armband on the field of play to denote 'the death of democracy' in Zimbabwe. It was particularly defiant because Mugabe is the patron of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union, which, to its shame, reprimanded the pair for making a 'political gesture in the course of a sporting competition. Like Olonga, Flower has now retired, and, also like his former team-mate, he will probably settle in England, at least until life in his own land becomes bearable.
The extraordinary aspect of the Mugabe thugs' encroachment into South Africa on their revolting errand emerged in a thorough account of the attempted capture by Neil Manthorp in the Sunday Telegraph. Manthorp, an Englishman who has made his home in the Cape, has proved to be the only journalist in recent years who has tried to get to the bottom of the murky happenings in South African cricket, and has, as night follows day, earned the enmity of Ali Bacher, who remains the single most important voice within that world.
According to Manthorp, the Zimbabwe thugs were entertained during the match in East London by the World Cup organisers. You want to capture one of your players on our soil? It's all right with us! Perhaps this is what 'pie-eyed' Percy Sonn, the preposterous piss artist of Paarl (he is the president of the South African cricket board, and got frightfully drunk at one World Cup match, when he also directed foul language at spectators), meant when he talked of standing side by side with 'our African brothers'. Kick him out, for goodness' sake. The man's a buffoon.
So Olonga remains a free man, living for the time being in a safe house in South Africa as he tries to arrange some sort of cricket to play in England this summer, when Zimbabwe are scheduled to play two Tests here. What sort of team they will bring is hard to say. The ZCU is committed to a programme of positive discrimination in favour of black players, and that policy has never improved any team in any sport at any time.
We hear so much in sports reporting of 'heroism' and 'tragedy'. Every time a footballer belts a scoring opportunity over the bar, some halfwit comes on the wireless to describe it as a 'disaster'. Olonga and his team-mates have lived through a genuine national disaster, and they are acquainted, every one of them, with tragedy. Olonga and Flower have behaved heroically, though they have played it down. There isn't much we can do, but we can at least salute their courage.
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