Sports and Polictics somehow magically mix, when a politician wants to raise his popularity by being seen at a Test Match, Baseball game, Yaught Race whatever, but when the tough decisions have to be made, all of a sudden this line about “not mixing” gets rolled out. Let’s start mixing sports and politics and every other bloody thing we have to, to save the next 700 thousand people!

It is exactly because of the lack of international criticism that the situation has escalated so dramatically over the last few years. The world’s silence has been correctly interpreted by Mugabe as a license to proceed unhindered and what a dangerous dynamic this is.

Someone, somewhere at sometime, has to do something. Not because it will guarantee change, nothing ever does, but rather because we are morally obligated to take a stand when human rights abuses reach such cataclysmic proportions.

If Tony Blair sent an army of bulldozers through Manchester obliterating every home in the city, do you think there would be an Australian academy squad on its way to England? How about if John Howard wiped out Brisbane? Would cricket life go on unaffected?

The more that ‘normal’ events like cricket tours continue to proceed in Zimbabwe the less catastrophic the country’s issues appear to the outside world and that is the real harm of this and other tours.

Also remember, it was cricketers who used the stage given to them by the 2003 World Cup to try and draw international attention to Zim’s situation. It’s just a shame the international media isn’t really interested.