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Writing in the Age, Peter Roebuck makes the argument that while there is plenty to dislike about the Howard nomination for the post of ICC Vice President, once the NZC and CA proposed his name, it is incumbent on all other members of the ICC to accept this without murmur as this has been ICC convention.
To buttress this claim, Roebuck cites the examples of Ray May Mali,Percy Sonn, Peter Chingoka. To quote from the article
"A board that welcomed Percy Sonn, who declared the 2003 Zimbabwe election free and fair though he knew it was a lie, thereby condemning Zimbabweans to years of torment; a board that accepted Ray Mali, whose co-operation with the apartheid government was exposed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; a board that listens to Peter Chingoka and Ozias Bute, apologists for evil in Zimbabwe, is poorly placed to turn its back on Jack the Ripper, let alone a former PM and cricket fanatic."And this reasoning is flawed.
Because what Percy Sonn or Ray Mali did in their previous avatars ( before becoming cricket administrators) is not relevant. Neither is Peter Chingoka's being an apologist to Robert Mugabe.
Because no one is opposiing John Howard's candidature because of Tampa incident or his support for the war in Iraq. The opposition is to Howard, the incumbent ICC Vice President, not Howard, the ex Prime Minister of Australia.
And by trying to extrapolate one to the other,Peter Roebuck makes for a disingenuous argument.
Pity, because he does articulate the more logical reasons for why SA or Zimbabwe might oppose John Howard later in the piece.
2 comments:
Really? I thought Roebuck was most wrong about India, not SA or Zimbabwe.
The quote you give is directly related to the reasons later ascribed to SA. Zimbabwe on one level have the most defensible objection, but Roebuck is predictably refusing to see it on that level, and I don't think the conflict there is straight-forward enough to write off an argument as 'disingenious'.
On the other hand, he might be overplaying the significance of the relatively recent agreements on the nomination process, and how much of his comments on India make any sense at all?
Jonathan,
Blaming India for all of crickets ills, real or imagined, has become a habit for some time now. By dragging India in the John HOward controversy, Roebuck has played true to that habit.
The disingenuous part of the argument that Roebuck makes is when he compares Mali and Sonn and Chingoka in the different roles they played ( outside of cricket administration) and extrapolates those with their positions in the ICC to make his point.
Cheers,
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