Play, or else ...

It seems we’re set for another round of that old and decidedly bogus phenomenon – cricket’s so-called racial divide. Australia and England face the prospect of top players refusing to go to Pakistan for the Champions’ Trophy. The country is violent and turbulent, they argue, and the tournament is being played on the anniversary of 9/11 – though I doubt that final factor makes the cricketers any less or more vulnerable.

The ICC should have seen this coming but has been deliberately and cussedly ostrich-like. A few weeks ago, I met a senior cricket official from a south Asian country and asked him if he foresaw problems ahead. After all, nothing had changed between the cancellation of the Australian tour of Pakistan in April and now. Pakistan was unlikely to experience a change in threat perceptions by the late summer. Would not the same logic and the same fear factor that drove away Andrew Symonds and Cricket Australia still hold true?

My question was waved aside with an “It’s all okay.” Now that the problem is beginning to emerge and be heard, the ICC is still insisting that Pakistan is perfectly safe and that the upcoming Asia Cup is an adequate dress rehearsal. Should the Australians and English think otherwise, be certain that somebody will conjure up the familiar “Asians versus Old Empire” argument and sundry Indian and Pakistani busybodies will go around making smug statements about how the West hates cricket’s new power equations.

This is not to suggest that the cricketers who don’t want to go to Pakistan are necessarily correct or even consistent. Yet, the fact is they have a right to be worried and a right to be consulted, without cricket officials giving them a “take it or leave it” ultimatum.

True, the Jaipur terror blasts did not affect the Indian Premier League. In July 2005, the Lord’s Test between Australia and England began exactly two weeks after the London bombings and there was never a suggestion of cancellation. Even so, there are two factors to be considered in case of the Champions’ Trophy.

First, while the whole world is threatened by terrorism, Jaipur and London were one-off incidents. Pakistan has been a battleground for the past few years, and the past seven or eight months have been particularly disturbing. In 2002, Australia moved a post-9/11 series in Pakistan to Sri Lanka and Sharjah, and the ICC nodded in agreement. It can be argued that the security situation in Pakistan has worsened in the past six years. Not that Pakistani cricket fans are to blame for this, but surely if cricketers are anxious they have a point.

Second, and this is a more damning indictment of the cricket establishment and its dogged refusal to realistically understand what motivates a sportsperson, nobody takes the Champions’ Trophy seriously. It is a meaningless, oversize tournament that is set for obsolescence, especially after the success of Twenty20.

If no Australian cricketer even considered going home from England in 2005, it was because an Ashes series was cherished as a personal landmark and a larger tradition not to be messed with. In the case of the IPL, the instinct was baser – the money was so good that nobody wanted to flee the bank. Noble aspirations and commercial impulses – so much of our lives is a mix of these two motivations, why shouldn’t it be so for cricketers?

The Champions’ Trophy is different. It is a crashing bore. The last edition became a television disaster after the Indians got knocked out, indicating that only mindless fanatics – the sort who follow their team’s scorecards during side matches in Zimbabwe – were interested.

While scheduling tournaments – in terms of frequency as well as geographical setting –cricket boards and the ICC must consult their players. If some players want to pick and choose, given an over-burdened cricket calendar and a host of other attendant parameters, they should be given that space. As societies, we need to stop treating cricketers as proxy soldiers.

Otherwise, private employers like the Indian Cricket League will seem more attractive and amenable. If my boss refuses to listen to me, I may settle for a less high-profile but reasonably paying job elsewhere.

By all means play the Champions’ Trophy in Pakistan – and may it go off smoothly and swimmingly – but don’t rubbish or penalise the players who express their doubts or don’t want to go. The ICC and its affiliates, sadly, have an HR policy devised for robots.