The Australian
1 July 2010
By Malcolm Conn
THE ICC snubbing of the former PM is a loss for cricket.
THE apparatchiks who so swiftly dispensed with Kevin Rudd last week have nothing on the faceless men of the International Cricket Council responsible for John Howard’s insidious demise.
The rejection of the former prime minister’s nomination for future president of cricket’s governing body was a gutless act committed by the presidents of cricket’s seven Afro-Asian countries, who could not even look Howard in the eye.
They have destroyed the ICC’s electoral system and cricket’s credibility in the process.
Zimbabwe, the pariah of cricket, began a whispering campaign against Howard months ago. Through the ICC’s anti-colonial machinations, it resulted in six of those seven presidents signing a letter on Tuesday night, after the first day of a two-day board meeting in Singapore, objecting to Howard’s nomination and refusing to let him address the board.
Only Zimbabwe, which began the rot, refrained from signing on the recommendation of its Sports Minister David Coltart, a long-time opponent of Robert Mugabe. Coltart has been trying to rebuild cricketing relations with Australia and New Zealand as part of an inclusive government.
Zimbabwe Cricket officials, who are closely aligned with Mugabe’s Zanu PF party, have been trying just as hard to tear them down.
The letter was an attempt to undermine Howard and force the countries that put him forward, Australia and New Zealand, to choose another candidate.
They picked the wrong man to bully. After a lifetime in politics, including 11 years as prime minister, Howard stepped squarely on to the front foot and went searching for answers from the presidents who were so keen to avoid him, button-holing one.
“I said, ‘What’s the issue?’ He said, ‘The issue is that some people around me think your appointment will be bad for cricket governance,’ ” Howard tells The Australian from Singapore. “I said, ‘How and why?’ He said he couldn’t say.”
Among the whispers, Howard’s support for targeted sanctions against Zimbabwe and opposition to economic sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa were apparently held against him. Howard rails against both suggestions. “I didn’t agree with economic sanctions against South Africa just as people like Helen Suzman, who was sympathetic to Mandela and the ANC, didn’t agree with them either,” he says.
“I’m not going to walk away from that, but these things weren’t mentioned.
“If I was a supporter of apartheid I could understand it, but I wasn’t. No Australian political figure of that era was sympathetic to apartheid, it’s just that people had different ways [of opposing it].”
Likewise, he is unfazed about his action against Zimbabwe while in government, with travel bans on officials including the duplicitous president of Zimbabwe Cricket, Peter Chingoka.
“I wear the criticism as a badge of honour. I don’t apologise in any way for the criticism I offered of the Mugabe regime,” Howard says. “If it was in some way based on past political positions, well, that’s a very bad precedent to be establishing for the ICC.
“I’m out of politics. I don’t have any political agenda internationally other than, of course, promoting good relations between Australia and our long-term friends, many of which are cricket-playing nations in both Asia and Africa.”
The cowardice of the secret seven was complete when, on Wednesday at Raffles City Convention Centre, those opposing Howard, which amounted to every leading cricket country except England, Australia and New Zealand, couldn’t even find the courage to take a formal vote.
Australia and New Zealand were simply asked to come back by the end of next month with another candidate. No explanation was given.
A furious Cricket Australia has called an emergency board meeting, to be held within a week, and refused to rule out renominating Howard, who refuses to withdraw his bid for the presidency.
Such a stand is likely to be futile and pragmatism is expected to take over as the fury of the snub subsides. No one wants to get cricket’s cash cow, India, off side.
Just how willing Australia and everyone else is to placate a nation responsible for up to 80 per cent of the game’s wealth became obvious when India last toured during the 2007-08 summer.
India lost the second Test in Sydney in close and contentious circumstances and demanded West Indian umpire Steve Bucknor be sacked for not giving Andrew Symonds out caught behind. The ICC sacked Bucknor.
Australia captain Ricky Ponting reported India’s spinner Harbhajan Singh for racial abuse against Symonds in the same Test and he was suspended by ICC match referee Mike Procter.
India threatened go home. Terrified that millions of dollars in television rights would disappear on the same plane, Cricket Australia held a late-night meeting with its increasingly disillusioned players, convincing them to drop the charge of racial abuse for simple abuse at an appeal.
They reluctantly agreed, the ICC made a complete hash of the appeal, and Harbhajan escaped suspension.
Cricket’s most powerful man is also its most faceless. Leading Indian-based cricket website Cricinfo describes Board of Control for Cricket in India president Shashank Manohar as an introvert bordering on reclusive.
A prominent Nagpur lawyer who became the BCCI president in 2008, he is said to be a man of simple tastes who does not carry a mobile phone or a watch, did not have a passport until 2007, and his first foreign trip was to Dubai to attend an ICC meeting in 2008.
Manohar was, quite ironically, a staunch Sharad Pawar loyalist. No longer. Pawar, who was elected yesterday as ICC president, with no vice-president following Howard’s rejection, had previously supported Howard, or at least the process that would have seen him elected. Manohar, too, had initially told Australia that India was supportive, then all went quiet. Apparently, Zimbabwe had been on the phone.
Such are the shifting stands of cricket politics. Manohar was once vice-president of the BCCI under Pawar and their relationship goes back to the time when Pawar was Maharashtra’s chief minister and his father, V. R. Manohar, the advocate general of the state.
Manohar was not the only one to be corralled back into the Afro-Asian bloc. Pakistan and Bangladesh told outgoing president David Morgan, a retired Welsh industrialist, that they too would support the process that should have rubber-stamped Howard into the job months ago. In the end neither did.
Former ICC chief executive Malcolm Speed, who was sacked in 2008 attempting to bring Zimbabwe to account for dubious financial dealings, described Pakistan Cricket Board president Ijaz Butt as a “buffoon”.
He wasn’t a great deal more complimentary towards former Bangladesh cricket heads.
“During my seven years as chief executive of ICC there were two presidents of the Bangladesh Cricket Board, both of whom were members of parliament and both of whom ended up in jail when there was a change of government,” Speed tells The Australian.
But Chingoka is the most disturbing and dangerous man on the ICC board, as he has proved again. A big man with a big smile in a starving country, he has followed the lead of his Zanu PF masters by destroying the game at all levels, just as Zanu PF has destroyed the country so those at the top can keep their snouts in the trough.
The Zimbabwe cricket team is a rump and has not played Test cricket for five years, yet still maintains full voting rights and all the millions of dollars in dividends that are distributed to the 10 full member countries.
As the new Sports Minister in the inclusive government, Coltart has been attempting to rebuild the national team by luring back disaffected players and administrators. He even asked his long-time protagonist Mugabe if he had any issue with Howard, an outspoken critic of Zimbabwe’s regime. “He said what’s past is past and he had no objection. That Zimbabwe Cricket must act in its best interest,” Coltart tells The Australian.
Sadly, The Herald in Zimbabwe, a Zanu PF mouthpiece, did not take the same conciliatory line about Howard’s dash to Harare last week for what proved to be a fruitless meeting with Chingoka and his flunkies.
The opinion piece is a rant that, once again, highlights the bizarre logic of a regime that has destroyed a country and its cricket.
“Cricket and world sport . . . does not need the likes of Howard, lest the sport be drawn into the gutters. He . . . cannot talk of developing a sport, which he has done so much to destroy for political ends,” the newspaper says. “He is a wolf in sheepskin, with the sole aim of returning the sport to the dark ages where it was a preserve of the Anglo-Saxon countries . . .
“He has nothing to offer to sport, which spreads a message of unity, against his racist thoughts.”
Remarkably, ZC keeps trying to tell the world it remains neutral on Howard, deflecting attention to South Africa and India.
The ICC’s decision to destroy its processes and protocols was criticised in an editorial in the Indian Express. “The campaign against Howard, more through rumours than official statements, centred on his decision when he was PM to put sanctions on cricket officials of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe,” the newspaper says.
“His comments on Muttiah Muralitharan’s [bowling] technique are also cited as proof of his insularity.
“In effect, the dissenting cricket boards are sending out the message that . . . they can keep out anybody who may have ever disagreed with one of them, that too in a personal or political capacity, with no reasons given. That’s dangerous for the sport.”
Malcolm Conn is chief cricket writer for The Australian.