Sydney Morning Herald
By Gideon Haigh
July 4, 2010
John Howard, a political manipulator, fell foul of cricket’s political manipulations.
India’s cricket board is auditing the hotel and limousine receipts of its cleverest young administrator. Australia is about to play a Test series against Pakistan in England. Zimbabwe has a sports minister from the Movement for Democratic Change.
Spot the connection between these three news items and you probably spend too much time thinking about cricket. But you may also have read during the week that six member boards of the International Cricket Council have opposed the ascension to its presidency of Australia’s second-longest serving PM, in which all the foregoing are factors.
You remember John Howard, don’t you? That’s right, the off-spinner. Well, it was the turn of Australia and New Zealand to nominate a new ICC vice-president, who would after two years become president for a further two years.
Australia asked him. He was up for it. New Zealand had an excellent candidate too. His name was Sir John Anderson. By a committee on which both countries were represented, Howard was chosen – not quite the end of the story, but close to it.
Now, Howard’s appointment may look a little odd. He may be the first bowler in history to deliver a yorker at the wrong end. But he wrangled a veritable freak show of a cabinet for 11 years when Kevin Rudd couldn’t manage it for three, which implies some organisational acumen. The ICC, too, is nothing if not a political organisation, of which Howard has seen probably rather too many.
Anyway, Nelson Mandela was busy being a nonagenarian, Al Gore was probably having a massage, and . . . well, for heaven’s sake, it’s a body set up to organise games of cricket, not bring peace to the Middle East, or answer the Schleswig-Holstein question.
Cricket Australia and New Zealand Cricket expected that, as is customary, their prerogative of choosing a nominee would be respected – and, believe me, this job has been held by some total plonkers.
Early indications were that all would be well. That changed, first a little, then a lot, albeit that nobody was quite clear on the reasons. When Howard asked why Cricket South Africa was hostile, its chairman Mtutuzeli Nyoka replied: ”I can’t tell you.”
The personalities who mattered most were those of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, without whose say-so nothing to do with the game now takes place.
Overwhelmingly the largest contributor to global cricket income, India has turned the game upside down with an annual Twenty20 tournament, the Indian Premier League, over which the ICC has no jurisdiction despite it steadily eating international cricket’s lunch.
Yet India, as those who spend too much time thinking about cricket will know, has in the past three months turned into a fever-swamp of corruption, intrigue and retribution. The Indian Premier League’s high-flying cricket impresario, Lalit Modi, has fallen out with his old Board of Control for Cricket in India cronies, who only ever liked him for the great steaming piles of cash he earned them.
To provide chapter and verse would require a modest set of encyclopaedias. Suffice it to say that thinking too much about cricket has its consolations: l’affaire Modi has been a non-stop laugh riot, O. J. meets GFC, dragging in cabinet ministers, chief executives, mistresses and bikini models alike.
It reached the stage last week of forensic examination of Modi’s suitably lavish expenses. All this seems to have played a part in India’s inability to make any determination where Howard was concerned until the 11th hour – in context, the ICC was just not that big a deal.
In this vacuum, other agendas emerged. Zimbabwe, suspended from Test cricket, has an impressive new Sports Minister, David Coltart, from the Movement for Democratic Change, denied the election victory it deserved in March 2008 but now forming an uneasy coalition with Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF.
Sensing an opportunity to end their isolation, and cordially detesting Howard for his role in it, Zimbabwe’s administrators were happy to destabilise his nomination, even if Coltart intervened to prevent their official opposition.
And, although we are moving into a world of shadows and mutterings, each of the other boards also had domestic reasons to assert themselves. Unable to host inbound tours for security reasons, and lumbered with a serially incompetent boss dependent on political patronage, the Pakistan Cricket Board is desperate for credibility of any kind.
Cricket South Africa, whose sport is dwarfed in cultural and political significance by rugby and soccer, would likewise benefit in countrymen’s eyes from a popular gesture of standing up to proverbially arrogant Australians.
Sri Lanka Cricket was always committed to opposing Howard, for his flippant but foolhardy remarks six years ago about the island nation’s champion Muttiah Muralitharan. It and the board of Bangladesh are also starveling bodies needing to remain the right side of India to ensure their on-going viability. The West Indies? Maybe Howard disparaged Bob Marley in someone’s hearing.
Who knows what the thinking is, of course, or even if there was thinking at all? For in all the febrile theorising last week about why countries took such exception to Howard, one obvious answer was overlooked: because they could.
Nothing hinged on their decision. The ICC could muddle along without a vice-president. For all its growing powerlessness, most of the time it could barely exist at all.
Rallying against Howard, then, was a painless sort of protest, casting its instigators as weighty men of affairs, while costing them no time, no status and, most importantly, no money: on the contrary, for men under pressure in a cricket world stripped of its former certainties, kicking sand in Australia’s face and cocking a snook at a controversial politician would have made them feel refreshingly relevant again.
They aren’t. India matters – the rest are supplicants. This was anything but a show of unity or strength. It was a confession of desperate, almost pitiful, weakness.
Gideon Haigh’s latest book is “Good Enough: The Ashes 2009.”