The Australian
February 19, 2011
By Owen Slot
IN one of the least likely comebacks in sport, the Zimbabwe squad at this World Cup will be led on the subcontinent by a coaching and management team who recently fell so foul of their country’s politics that it had seemed they were gone for good.
Take Heath Streak, for instance, whose playing career was cut short in its prime when he was sacked as captain by administrators wielding racial policies and whose father was imprisoned by Robert Mugabe’s Zanu (PF) regime in 2002, when he refused to surrender the family farm.
Streak is in India with the Zimbabwe team as bowling coach.
Or Grant Flower, whose career was terminated in 2004 in the same argument as Streak’s and who once said: “Never again.” He is the batting coach.
And Alistair Campbell, another former captain, who so regularly fell foul of the politics that his career was over at the age of 30. He is the chairman of selectors. They have been encouraged back largely by David Coltart, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) politician who was once prosecuted and detained, and who survived an assassination attempt. Coltart is now the Education, Culture and Sport Minister.
And on the board of Zimbabwe Cricket (ZC), Campbell is joined by Doc Mukuhlani, another MDC supporter, whose farm was regularly attacked — he eventually lost it — whose mother was badly beaten, and whose father was taken away for two weeks by pro-Mugabe war veterans.
“It can’t go on for ever,” Mukuhlani said. “Some day it will change. But cricket is bigger than any of us.”
The force of cricket, it would seem, is so great that Mukuhlani can sit on that ZC board with others who are recipients of the kind of farms he surrendered. And so great that Ozias Bvute and Peter Chingoka, whose policies killed off Streak’s old team and caused Zimbabwe to be dispatched to cricket’s international wilderness, are still the ZC’s chief executive and president respectively and still in charge of the payroll they once so controversially withheld from the players. Oh yes, and the ZC patron is still Mugabe.
How can so many make such a concerted about-turn?
“You develop a certain thick skin,” is how Gary Brent put it. Brent is another of Streak’s rebel team; he worked as a coach at Rugby School in Warwickshire before being persuaded to return to coach back home. “You’ve got to make a decision,” Flower said. “Do you help the recovery or do you stay bitter?”
You also have to transplant yourself to the mindset of Africa, where you are used to sustaining blows and making a comeback. Not that anything here is remotely clear cut.
Of those two black-armband rebels from the 2003 World Cup, Andy Flower, now the England team director, and Henry Olonga, Flower is in favour of giving Zimbabwe a second chance. Olonga, meanwhile, lives in London and has still not been back.
“I believe nothing has changed,” Olonga said. “I’ll never trust the system as far as I can spit.”
As it has for many years, cricket seems to reflect the whole country. It required a “huge compromise”, Coltart explained, for him to go into the unity government.
“We’re in bed with people we’ve been opposed to, in my case for three decades.” Campbell would say exactly the same of ZC.
It was Campbell whom Coltart identified as the man to lead the way back for cricket. Campbell was approached in the summer of 2009 and required persuading. He needed guarantees: that he would be able to select his teams on merit, that colour of skin was irrelevant.
“I had to get the old guard back because there was no manpower left to coach the new generation,” Campbell said. “So I had to make sure that they were coming back to the real deal.”
Campbell became the chief recruiting officer. He targeted Streak, met him at a game in Bulawayo where Streak was doing commentary work and persuaded him to talk to the selectors.
“Initially there was some scepticism,” Streak said. “But I’ve got over that. It’s all about keeping cricket alive in Zimbabwe.”
And then Grant Flower. “It took me six months to think about it,” Flower said. “It wasn’t an easy decision. I did ask, ‘What’s (Mugabe’s) involvement?’ and was told he did nothing. I was OK by that. When I first asked my brother Andy about it, he told me to think about it and take my time, but the more he thought, the more he gave me his blessing.”
Everyone knows there is a compromise here.
“Life in Africa is very turbulent,” Grant Flower said. “I’ll always keep my options open.”
But likewise, the returnees say that their reassurances from ZC have all been met.
“I only see Chingoka once every three months,” Campbell said. “And it’s easy working with him; once you agree to bury the hatchet, you move on.”
The moving-on has been embraced by the international cricket world, too. Zimbabwe last played a Test match in 2005; its Test status had been suspended until last June when the ICC sent senior executives to Harare, where they were persuaded that ZC had satisfied all the requirements for it to be reintroduced into the Test arena. Its comeback Test will therefore be against Bangladesh in July; New Zealand and Pakistan will follow.
The moving-on has been embraced by Andy Flower, too. Last July, Flower addressed the MCC world cricket committee with a presentation that, a statement explained, “covered the full range of moral, ethical, political and cricketing considerations”, and the result of which was MCC’s decision to send a fact-finding trip to Zimbabwe to gauge the suitability of touring there again.
MCC’s position, however, changed mighty fast after the government turned round and said: “No you won’t.”
It is, in fact, England alone which will not now re-engage with Zimbabwe. Campbell travelled to England last September to attempt to broker an informal softening of relations. He brought Bvute with him “just to demystify the bloke”.
But when they went to Cardiff, on the day England were playing a Twenty20 match against Pakistan, David Collier, the ECB chief executive, refused to see them.
“We didn’t want to create a stir,” Campbell said. “I’d have thought, just out of common courtesy, he’d have met us to find out how things were going. It was the perfect opportunity to explain where we’re at, but he didn’t want to listen. He wouldn’t tolerate it.”
There is, of course, a world of difference between civil politics and cricket politics. If Collier wanted to know about the cricket, he could just ask the Zimbabwe head coach, Alan Butcher, the former England batsman, or any of the English cricketers who earned a winter salary there.
But this is not black or white, it is about what shade of grey you will live with.
Attempts have been made to persuade Olonga to come back, but he will not yet consider it.
“People like to say, ‘It’s all fine and a bed of roses now,’ but there is so much to be questioned,” he said. “If you look for trouble, you find it; if you want to ignore it, you can.”
Which is an interesting take: if you go back to Zimbabwe, how much are you ignoring the truth, and to what extent are you trying to improve it?