Time to leave, say Lillee and friends

Several of Australian cricket's senior elders have given their blessings for the team, currently fishing and playing golf as they wait for Friday's announcement on Zimbabwe's future, to come home.

Dennis Lillee said that if the two scheduled Tests lost their official status, it was pointless for the players to carry on regardless. "I'm not being unkind to the minnows, but the idea of promoting them was designed to fill space on pay TV," was Lillee's brutal assessment.

He told the West Australian newspaper: "They went there on the understanding they were going to play Test matches. If the goalposts have moved, what's the point of being there?"

Kim Hughes, the former Australian captain, was equally adamant that the whole tour should be called off. "I think it's a farce and if you're not good enough to play Test cricket, then you're not good enough to play one-dayers. End of story."

Kerry O'Keeffe criticised the ICC for not acting sooner and said Australia were wrong to proceed with the tour in the first place. "I don't think we should have gone," he said. "Even at the time, the circumstances looked very poor. For years, a lot of former players have put the slipper into the ICC for good reasons. Again they seem to have sat on their hands."

Meanwhile two other old Australian cricketers, Dean Jones and Bruce Yardley, are also awaiting Friday's ICC telephone hook-up with interest. Both are intending to commentate on the series, should it go ahead, for Fox Sport. Jones said his contract with the Zimbabwe Cricket Union gave him "carte blanche" to offer his opinion about cricketing matters but forbade him from saying "anything about the country itself".

"We just have to be careful what we say about Mugabe," Jones told The Australian newspaper. "I've got no big deal about it. I'm just there to watch the cricket and I don't give a rat's arse what he does about his country."

But both Hughes and O'Keeffe said the issue ran deeper than Zimbabwe fielding a substandard XI. They said Zimbabwe's Test status should be removed until teams are once again picked on merit, not skin colour.

"It's a wider issue than cricket," said O'Keeffe. "The only similarity I can think of is South Africa 30 years ago and really the only way it could be sorted out was through a change of politics, a change of attitudes."