Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Daniel Vettori captain of newzealand cricket team


The last time time we went to Zimbabwe - in 2005 - there was almost fury over us going. The Green Party were signing petitions and bringing Henry Olongo over here to speak about how wrong touring would be, and a lot of people just didn't want us to go. Our chief executive, Martin Snedden, was effectively forced to take a pro-tour stance because of the financial penalties that New Zealand Cricket would have suffered if we didn't tour.

We were trying to work through that while also being mindful of being consistent - because there were other countries that we play cricket against that didn't have fantastic human rights records, either. I think it was important to take that into account - the need for even-handedness. The ICC rules insisted we couldn't renege on our touring commitments on any grounds other than safety and security.

You can see the logic in this. There's a decent argument that if you start drifting away from that position, you'll end up with a very dysfunctional playing programme and make sides vulnerable to every sort of political movement possible. Teams would be pulling out of tours regularly, depending on international relationships at the time. There'd be tit-for-tat reprisals. Chaos.

Having said that, Zimbabwe is in a terrible state, and I'm not sure what the right answer is in terms of our sporting contacts. You can argue that we should be isolating them in order to show our disapproval of Robert Mugabe's regime, and that to continue sporting contact is, by implication, endorsing and condoning the current administration. You could, but from where I stand that's an exceptionally political and theoretical point of view.

On the other hand, there's a claim that we should continue to have sporting contacts with Zimbabwe, because to do so would effectively help to keep their national cricket team in existence and afford some opportunity for the local people, as well as keeping at least one channel of communication open with the free world.

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