Cricket: quiet on the pitch, shotguns in the townships

Labour Briefing no. 96, 7 February 1990, p. 14

Transcribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.

"If you want to ask me about cricket OK; if you want to talk about politics, ask a politician."

So said Mike Gatting last week, continuing his feigned ignorance about apartheid, as protesters were being fired on by riot police.

Really there is no great secret why the "rebel" English tourists are there. Mike Gatting is getting £200,000 for a two-year contract; the others are getting £100,000 plus.

Gatting's friend and co-tourist, off-spinner John Emburey went on the 1980 rebel tour. He and official English skipper Graham Gooch have been spied at Tory party conference. Mike Gatting himself puts the decline of English cricket down to poor teaching in schools — in particular "teachers' strikes". He cries when "Land of Hope and Glory" is played, and had crates of "English" food taken on the last tour of India.

England cricketers nowadays can get seriously rich — the likes of Botham, Gooch, Lamb and Gower are millionaires. Many of them are, like those who run the game seriously right-wing.

The tour is rapidly becoming the tour that nobody wants. Most South African blacks are not interested in cricket, and the organisers calculated that, like 1981, they would ignore it. No such luck.

The sight of demonstrators clashing with police is the last thing which de Klerk wants right now. With Western leaders praising the moves towards dialogue with the ANC, the South African government does not need cricket to show that it is not isolated. Gatting's tour is becoming more trouble than it is worth. But to call it off would be a humiliation.

For the Nationalist Party government the tour could not have started at a worse time. Nelson Mandela's statement re-affirming the ANC's socialist goals has — whatever its real intention — embarrassed the white power structure. Meanwhile the black opposition has been handed a protest focal-point on a plate. Gatting and friends can only expect things to get worse.

Nearly all the English tourists had contracts to play for England — lucrative ones at that. The cricket establishment was outraged that they broke their contracts to join the tour, but dragging Gatting, Broad, Dilley et al through the courts was too much to contemplate.

But most of the grandees who run the game would love to re-establish links with South Africa. If the black teams had not been the best in the world and insisted on a ban, "official" England would still be playing in Cape Town and Durban, instead of being thrashed in the West Indies.

However, principle turns up in the most unexpected places. White South Africans would love to see Ian Botham; he could have got £500,000 for going. He has always refused, on the grounds that he would never be able to look his black friends, like Viv Richards, in the face again. Seriously rich does not have to mean seriously racist; but in cricket it often does.

transcribed from the page image, 2 Nov 2026; spelling as printed ("Nationalist Party" for the National Party; "spied at Tory party conference"; "Many of them are, like those who run the game seriously right-wing" with one comma). By-line "By PHIL HEARSE" at the end of the third column. Complete on the page ("International Briefing"), no jump. Left out: the other items on the page (Piers Mostyn's "Britain in Ireland: Dirty tricks exposed", which continues under this piece; Ai Meun Lim's "Hong Kong: Democratic rights?"; the Chinese Solidarity Campaign model resolution).