The Zimbabweans in England, 2003
Review of Zimbabwe's tour of England in 2003.
Simon Briggs
15-Apr-2004
Less than three months after England's failure to fulfil their World Cup
fixture in Harare, a party of Zimbabwean cricketers arrived at Gatwick. As
their visit represented something of a political hot potato, the England and
Wales Cricket Board shared a common aim with its team: to get through
this awkward little tour without suffering too much embarrassment.
Though the mandarins came under far more pressure than the players,
both would emerge largely unscathed. The Zimbabwean captain, Heath
Streak, was leading a painfully inexperienced squad: only Grant Flower had
scored a Test hundred. Streak thus had rather less ammunition than Kate
Hoey, the Labour MP and former Minister for Sport.
"The Zimbabwe Cricket Union have [President] Mugabe as their patron,"
Hoey wrote in the Daily Telegraph on April 19. "Yet on May 22 at Lord's,
the most famous ground in the world, England will play against a country
soaked in the blood of men, women and children who have done nothing
other than stand up for the freedoms and rights that we in this country take
for granted."
Hoey's invective served as a rallying cry for the Stop The Tour campaign,
which was soon claiming the support of around 100 MPs. Yet only a handful
of them attended the first day's demonstrations outside the Grace Gates,
where the most recognisable figure was the serial agitator Peter Tatchell. The
game suffered two low-key interruptions in the afternoon, when a couple of
Tatchell's comrades wandered on to the pitch with placards. And that was
about as rough as things got for the ECB.
Crucially, the Stop The Tour movement went unsupported by the two
political parties who could have given it legitimacy. One was the ruling British Labour Party, whose cabinet minister Tessa Jowell approved the tour in a letter to the ECB. The other was the Zimbabwean opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who seemed to view cricket as a useful tool for redirecting the British media's attention towards Mugabe's outrages. The US-led war against Iraq, which preceded the tour, meant that the plight of
millions of Zimbabweans facing food shortages had gone largely unreported.
After the May 22 demonstration at Lord's, the Stop The Tour protest
dropped almost out of sight, and The Times newspaper took over. One of
its correspondents, Owen Slot, took a particularly hard line on the selection
of the Zimbabwean squad - which he argued was politically vetted - and
savaged the smooth-talking Peter Chingoka, the chairman of the Zimbabwe
Cricket Union, for his constant dissembling. "When the conversation strays
to topics anywhere beyond bat and ball," Slot wrote, "this is a squad that
is either frightened or incapable of talking truthfully."
Slot was right, of course, but it was not entirely the players' fault. The
treatment of Andy Flower and Henry Olonga, who were reprimanded after their brave black-armband protest at the start of the World Cup and
announced their retirements from international cricket when Zimbabwe were
knocked out, made it clear that dissenters would not be tolerated. Flower
himself admitted that he had talked a number of team-mates out of emulating
him, arguing that: "If everybody took the same stand, you would run the
serious risk of eliminating most of the side in one fell swoop. From what
I understand, the MDC would not be in favour of such drastic action."
Without Flower in particular, Zimbabwe proved to be a soft touch on the
field. Their bowling was often respectable, thanks to Streak's exemplary
leadership, but they simply could not make any runs. In two Tests and five
completed one-day internationals, they passed 200 on just three occasions,
with a top score of only 253. Their one worthwhile win - a four-wicket
triumph over England in the NatWest Series opener - was underpinned by
the only meaningful innings of any quality, Grant Flower's unbeaten 96.
They were even thrashed by Ireland.
England cashed in on Zimbabwe's naivety. For the first time in 25 years,
they won every Test in a series - even if the series was only two games long.
And with Darren Gough, Andrew Caddick and Andrew Flintoff unavailable
through injury, they were able to blood a few novices of their own.
Much of the pre-publicity focused on the artfully styled head and shoulders
of James Anderson, the emerging poster boy of English cricket, who followed
up an encouraging World Cup by taking five for 73 at Lord's on his Test
debut. But there were also debuts for the Yorkshire captain, Anthony
McGrath, who became the first Englishman since David Gower to score
fifties in his first two Test innings, and the Somerset paceman Richard
Johnson. After numerous near misses with England over the previous eight
years, Johnson finally won selection for the Second Test at Chester-le-Street.
He was soon making up for lost time, finding himself on a hat-trick in his
first over, and finishing the innings with six for 33.
At the end of that humiliating match, which they lost by an innings and
69 runs, Zimbabwe's downward slide continued with the removal of opening batsman Mark Vermeulen from the tour. There appeared to be nothing
politically motivated about this move: instead, Vermeulen was being punished
for what the team management described as a series of petty indisciplines.
It quickly emerged that Vermeulen had had a reputation for being a hothead
ever since his schooldays, when he once reacted to a bad lbw decision by
walking off with the stumps. If there was a last straw for the officials on
this tour, it came after close of play on the Friday of the Second Test, when
Vermeulen refused to take the bus with the rest of the team from the ground
to their nearby hotel. His solitary mood may be partly explained by the fact
that he had just completed a rare and unenviable feat: bagging a pair on the
same day of a Test match.
England finished the series in contrastingly upbeat mode, both in the
dressing-room and the executives' offices. But the sting in the tail was still
to come. After the Harare shemozzle, the ZCU were hardly going to fulfil
their summer obligations without asking the ECB for a few assurances in
return, notably over England's scheduled visit to Zimbabwe in November
2004. The board had no alternative but to commit but, as the Zimbabwe
crisis deepened at the end of 2003, the chances of England actually going,
barring a change of regime, looked increasingly remote.