John Howard... My Hero This Week

Some people believe that sports and politics shouldn't mix, that's a fine ideal if you have a situation when sport can be self funded and events such as the World Cup and the Olympics can be put on without financial support from Governments. Unfortunately we live in a far from ideal world and sometimes a stand has to be taken, a stand that transcends sport and politics and is about the importance of human rights.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has ordered the country's cricket team to pull out of a scheduled tour of Zimbabwe in September. He said the tour would be an "enormous propaganda boost" to Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, a "grubby dictator". Mugabe is getting away with murder, intimidation of opposition politicians and the starving of his people. In the bigger schemes of things a cricket tour might be small beer and the beatings will probably continue but at some point somebody has to say enough is enough.

When Jesse Owens ran in Berlin in 1936 he succeeded in showing Hitler how ridiculous his ideals of Ayrian supremacy were, perhaps if Owens had tripped over his shoe laces things would have been different but he didn't and they aren't. From that moment sports and politics became entwined. My own experience of politics and sports clashing was back in 1969 when the Springboks rugby union toured England and Wales. I was only nine at the time but South Africa stayed at the Dormy Hotel in Ferndown, the town where I lived, and trained on our school field. I can remember how excited we all were at the thought of seeing them play at Twickenham, as it was we weren't allowed to go and watching the match on ESPN last week I was struck at the ratio of policemen to spectators.

The Australian team was due to play three one-day internationals and there had been pressure on the Cricket Australia not to allow the tour to go ahead, the board were reluctant at first to cancel because of the mandatory $2 million fine - this will however be waived because the Australian government has told the team they can't go.

Mr Howard said on Australia's ABC television: "The government through the foreign minister has written to Cricket Australia instructing that the tour not go ahead. We don't do this lightly but the Mugabe regime is behaving like the Gestapo towards its political opponents."

The words Nazi and Gestapo are overused and misused but given the evidence to support the claims by Opposition leaders of brutality and attempted murder they are for once not an exaggeration.

The Australian P.M continued, "Whilst it pains me both as a cricket lover and as somebody who genuinely believes these things should be left to sporting organisations... it leaves me with no alternative," said Mr Howard.

It is not that Cricket Australia do not want to help Zimbabwe and the development of the game there but recent articles by Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Angus Fraser have mentioned the fact that the Zimbabwe government does have a habit of syphoning off the money that cricket tours generate. There will be a proposal by Cricket Australia to hold a series of matches in South Africa, venue for the 20/20 World Cup later this year.

Zimbabwe's ambassador to Australia, Stephen Chiketa, said last week that politics had no place in sport and that banning the tour would hurt the development of cricket in his country.
"You have young players in Zimbabwe who want to emulate great cricket players in Australia," he told Australia's Seven television network. Take your politics somewhere else."

Whilst I have great sympathy with Stephen Chiketa, you have to wonder who was holding a gun to his head, both actually and metaphorically, when he made those comments.

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Follow-up:19/5/07 : I see from reading The Week that Melanie Philips has agreed with my sentiments in the Daily Mail (although obviously she hasn't mentioned me by name!) - this is worrying, am I mellowing as I get older?