Kenny said:
I'll have a whinge - SL batsman get a chance to score a couple of double hundreds, Murali gets a few cheap wickets, and now they decide the 'sanctity' of test cricket is under threat?
That's just great. You all know by now what I think is threatening the sanctity of test cricket.....and it ain't Zimbabwe!
So, how was anyone to *know* that a Zimbabwe team selected on a racial basis was going to be utterly carp until they had actually played a game or two, may I ask?
If it is the ZCU's stated view that the up-and-coming black players were at least as good as the honkies, and the only reason people didn't see that was because they had been unfairly held back, then who are we to gainsay them until there has been some evidence of how dreadful they are in reality?
The history of cricket is littered with embarrassing disasters afflicting the "most powerful team ever to leave England/Australia/India...." and extraordinary performances by teams thought to be the weakest fielded by England/Australia/India... in decades. Just because it was possible to look at the Zimbo youngster's f-c records and realise that they were *probably* not up to much, it would have been hellishly patronising to *assume* that they were no good until they'd had their own chances to prove it.
There's little doubt that when England first played Test cricket against South Africa and New Zealand, the NZ and SA teams were barely of minor county standard. But they got better, and people don't bother trying to expunge those ghastly mismatches from the books either - they just didn't bother to play against them very much - how many Tests were there between Australia and NZ between 1931 and 1971?
ICC threatening dire penalties on countries which don't want to take part in farcical matches is not a method for maintaining international cricket as the kind of special occasion which commands premium pricing for gate money and TV rights, and it's the fact that places like India have got better ways of making money than to host matches which nobody will attend or watch on TV that has finally made ICC realise that something has to be done about the racists who run the ZCU, not that ICC is prepared to take a moral stand. Under the present ICC regime, there would have been no boycott of South Africa, and they'd still be picking whites-only teams.
Cheers,
Mike