The Non Cricket Issues

There is a lot of cricket to be played in this World Cup, yet the stories from outside the field are in play.

Lost in Translation
The Pakistan Cricket Board instructs their cricket team to speak in Urdu only, with the manager tasked with the translation. Apparently speaking in Urdu will promote tourism in Pakistan and also prevent players from being misquoted. The tourism plug is as hare brained as it sounds. Obviously this is not going to increase tourism, but it most probably will result in fewer quotes from the Pakistani players being published so it really is a roundabout way of silencing their players. But, it doesn’t end there, the ICC frets that there will be a lot of time spent translating the interviews during the pre and post match ceremonies and brings out the stick that is the World Cup participating nations agreement where teams are contracted to conduct on-field interviews in English. They get into a conference room with the PCB chairman Naseem Ashraf to thrash out the matter. A compromise is reached whereby the players will speak in English for all media interviews on the field, and they will switch back to Urdu at the press conference. Hey, wait a minute, has anybody asked the players what they want? Ideally the players should speak in what ever language they are comfortable with.

Sunny vs the Aussies
Sunny Gavaskar doesn’t like the Australian cricket team, this is a known fact. He has been railing against their on-field behavior every opportunity he gets. In his World Cup preview column he attacked them once again for their ‘awful’ on-field behavior and evoked a response from Australia’s captain Ricky Ponting that Gavaskar is being ‘high and mighty’. Ponting is quite right in saying that, but that is what columnists are supposed to be, i.e. armchair critics. Sunny is also correct in saying that the Aussies are the worst behaved team in the World, but it was in responding to Ponting that Sunny lost it and behaved in the same rude manner that he accuses the Australians of. It was in bad taste to bring up the death of David Hookes in a scuffle outside the bar as an example of poor Aussie behavior. Australia doesn’t hold the copyright on bar room brawls, it happens all over the world. Hookes is dead and however mealy mouthed he may have been, let him rest in peace.

The new Idi Amin
Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, is fast becoming a dictator in the Idi Amin mould, and it is time to stop ignoring this fact. Andy Flower, former captain of Zimbabwe, is right in calling for sanctions against Zimbabwe, but I think it should not be mere sporting sanction it should be a series of United Nations sanctions. Mugabe doesn’t care about the cricket team; he cares about money for him and his supporters. He has been silencing his opposition with arrests, threats and violence. In his latest attack on the opposition Morgan Tsvangirai, President of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was badly beaten in police custody and sent to the hospital with a suspected fractured skull. We should no longer tolerate the thuggery of Mugabe and keep waiting till he becomes another Amin. The ICC money is not going to the cricketers it is going to the ZanuPF thugs running Zimbabwe Cricket. India with its financial clout in ICC should take on the leadership role in acting against Zimbabwe in both the cricketing and political spectrum. The time has come to stop worrying about their cricketers and start worrying about the people of Zimbabwe.