Opposition fury as England confirm tour

The controversy surrounding England's tour of Zimbabwe has heightened, following yesterday's announcement of a weakened squad for the series of five one-day internationals, which will take place at the end of November.

Speaking in Wednesday's edition of The Daily Telegraph, human rights activists and MPs from the Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe's opposition movement, have expressed their disgust that money should be the sole motivating force for English cricket, branding the decision to tour as "an appalling betrayal".

The tour came close to be abandoned this year, but ultimately the England & Wales Cricket Board was backed into a corner by the ICC, who threatened stiff financial penalties and a possible suspension if England did not fulfil the terms of the Future Tours Programme. A spokesman for the ECB said: "We have to do all we can to protect the financial interests of the game."

But opponents to Robert Mugabe's regime are livid. "I will not watch an international cricket game in Zimbabwe when there is so much suffering, and I love the game," Roy Bennett, a white MDC MP, told the paper. "How can the British come here? It is an appalling betrayal." His sentiments were echoed by Arnold Tsunga, the director of Lawyers for Human Rights, who added: "Do English cricket authorities simply not care about human rights? Is it only about money now?"

"Why do they feel comfortable to tour Zimbabwe?" asked Fidelis Mhashu, an MP and spokesman on sport for MDC. "We expect the ECB to give us moral support, and not to talk about money. The patron of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union is Mugabe. British sportsmen shunned apartheid, demonstrated against apartheid in those days, but here, where everyone is suffering, the English come to play sport for the sake of money."

So much bad feeling has already been stirred up, and the tour is still six weeks away. The whole enterprise seems tailormade to dampen the spirits of a squad that has finished the season on an unprecedented high - defeat in the Champions Trophy final notwithstanding -and there was further behind-the-scenes controversy at boardroom level over the weekend, as England tried to settle on their squad.

Despite claiming that they would not object if there were absentees on moral grounds, the ECB appeared to change tack at the last minute. England's coach, Duncan Fletcher, was forced to fight hard to secure a much-needed break for Marcus Trescothick and Andrew Flintoff, in addition to Steve Harmison, who had already confirmed his unavailability.