Shadow of US terror attacks casts pall over Cricket World Cup

The 2003 Cricket World Cup will be the "best" and "cleanest" to date, Lord Condon, the director of the ICC's Anti-Corruption Unit, said on Monday. But whether it will be the safest, in the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington, simply cannot be guaranteed.

Lord Condon was speaking at a joint media briefing of the ACU and the World Cup Security Directorate, to which the match-fixing commissioner has accepted an invitation to join.

Accompanied by senior investigator Jeff Rees and support manager Bob Smalley, Lord Condon is in South Africa for five days during which time he will visit Cape Town for meetings with Frank Kahn, the Director of Public Prosecutions for the Western Cape who is currently investigating the state of Hansie Cronje's indemnity against prosecution, the South African sports minister Ngconde Balfour and the British High Commissioner Ann Grant.

The intention is to keep the 2003 CWC free from both match-fixing and the type of pitch invasions seen at Edgbaston and Headingley this year. With a budget of R8-million the Security Directorate, headed by Patrick Ronan and which includes Rory Steyn, Nelson Mandela's former bodyguard, together with Lord Condon, these ambitions may well be realised.

But as last Tuesday's terror attacks demonstrated with such enormity, no potential target can be ruled completely secure and it is by no means certain that major sports events and packed stadia will be exempt from attack. It is likely, for instance, that Pakistan and India will meet during the World Cup at the Wanderers, South Africa's biggest cricket stadium. With Pakistan having been thrust, however unwillingly, into centre stage in the terrorism crisis, it is not hard to imagine circumstances in which the staging of such a match would amount to the utmost folly.

The ICC has already acknowledged that world events have intruded into the playing of sport by shifting its October board meeting from Lahore to Malaysia. It is by no means inconceivable that the meeting might have to be cancelled altogether.

Of course, the World Cup is still 17 months away and the extent and effectiveness of the United States' response to the attacks remains to be seen. And before South Africa hosts cricket's premier one-day tournament, the football World Cup will be staged in Japan and South Korea while the Winter Olympics will be held in Salt Lake City.

There were warnings at the media briefing against over-reaction and paranoia as well as talk of co-operation between the South African Government, law enforcement agencies, parastatals and the private sector. And fears that South Africa could find itself dragged into an international conflict may well prove unfounded.

But as Ben van Deventer, a senior South African Police Services official and member of the Security Directorate conceded afterwards: "You can do things like establishing `no-fly' zones around venues. The problem is enforcing them."