Shame on Sharma, shame on cricket, shame on us

www.GOcricket.com - http://www.gocricket.com/Shame-on-Rohit-cricket-and-on-us/Telford-Vice/columnshow/36340266.cms

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

If Rohit Sharma believes what he has been quoted as saying, that “critics are actually like girlfriends; they never stop thinking about you”, then cricket has failed society as much as society has failed cricket.

Here in South Africa, where the game has been a vehicle both for racial division and for unity, we know a few things about politics and sport.

We know, for instance, that there is as much chance of removing politics from sport as there is of removing sport from politics: none.

Some of us know that politics belongs in sport as it does in most other aspects of our lives. Without politics, in sport or anything else, there is no hope of fairness.

Fewer have realised that those who want the exorcism of politics from sport are not so much irked by the fact that it is present as they are by the flavour of the politics concerned. Put the politics they like into their sport and you will not hear a problematic peep from them.

We also know that politics is a mess and that anything tainted by it struggles for survival. But sport prospers because politics allows it to - if only to give the citizenry something less important to think about lest they turn their minds to the next election or even revolution.

Most pertinently, we know that there will be politics in sport no matter what we want or do. So, when our minister of sport, Fikile Mbalula, decrees unequivocally that all national teams will in future be 60% black, we wonder why they are not at least as black already. Are we not an African country? Have blacks not played cricket in South Africa for more than a century?

We know the answers to those questions just as well as we know that the only way to remedy the situation is to pump more politics into our sport. This is not about two wrongs making a right. It is about finally, after more than 350 years of criminal wrongdoing, getting something.

You want merit selection instead? Now, that is something we know nothing about here in South Africa, having never practised it. We have never known what our best XI is; not in the days of all-white sides being allowed to get away with calling themselves national teams and not now.

Many South Africans will agree and disagree with these arguments. That is their right, and it is the source of a national pride we carry quietly somewhere. We have the brashness to say what we think. People in other countries try to pretend their sport is equitable along racial, cultural lines and economic lines, or they refuse to see the problem with bananas being thrown at black players.

Which brings us back to Sharma. What kind of game teaches its players that people who do not like the way they play have nothing better to do than think about them? Worse, what makes these players assume their girlfriends - note the plural - are always thinking about them? What kind of society tolerates such a medieval mentality from a sport it apparently holds dear? If Sharma thought he was making a joke, he must have thought the people who would hear it would think it worth laughing at. Those people would be us. What does that tell us about ourselves?

There is enough in Sharma’s 11 words of stupidity to launch a thousand theses. None of them would paint him in a favourable light. How are we not to think of him as a bigot who holds a low opinion of all of us?

If he is a bigot, that is much more important than the fact that he is a fine cricketer. In fact, it would mean that is all he is. As a human being, based on his unfortunate utterance, he would not get anywhere near the first XI.

Here in South Africa, we know that what happens on the field is influenced by events and attitudes beyond the boundary just as we know that people who hold the profile of sports stars influence events and attitudes beyond the boundary. In this sorry instance, Sharma is a victim of society as much as he is an example of society’s mistakes.

Could the latent truth be that Rohit what’s-his-name is looking for a girlfriend? Perhaps, but he has reminded us that if we allow politics to escape from sport we will be left with barbarism.