Happy and inglorious

When Stuart MacGill declared himself unavailable to tour Zimbabwe a month ago he was reluctant to elaborate on the reasons why. But we can safely assume it was not the prospect of bowling too many third-rate Zimbabweans out too easily that bugged his conscience. No, MacGill wasn't comfortable about taking the field against a country that has made skin colour its primary selection criterion. He didn't want to play against a team that he wouldn't be welcome to play for himself.

It is a point every other Australian player and administrator appears to have missed. To them, it is fine to play Zimbabwe in a one-day game but not over five days. Conscience doesn't come into it. Their one and only concern is that Test cricket's image might suffer. Australia's own image, meanwhile, rots in the same melting heap it was left in on the tarmac at Sydney Airport eight days ago. We hear endlessly of the "sanctity" of Test cricket. Sanctity went out of the window eight days ago. Few moments in this country's cricket history can have been quite so inglorious.

Not that Australia is alone. The ICC, and by extension the eight other Test-member nations, were resolute in their conviction that their job is to make runs, not moral judgments; to take wickets, not ethical stands. Sri Lanka unapologetically beat this same Zimbabwean XI by an innings, twice. Zimbabwe raised not a whimper on the field, and Sri Lanka not a murmur of unease off it. For Muttiah Muralitharan, apparently no wicket that might help him reel in Courtney Walsh's world record was too tainted.

And it's not just the players and administrators who come out of this saga looking naïve at best, like mugs at worst. Dean Jones flew over to commentate on the series, signed a contract forbidding him to utter one syllable about President Robert Mugabe or the country he is wrecking, then felt so content about this situation that he told a journalist: "I'm just there to watch the cricket and I don't give a rat's arse what he does about his country."

Jones's words, though less diplomatically put, were not a million miles away from the Australian coach John Buchanan's at the pre-tour camp in Brisbane, nor from the captain Ricky Ponting's today. Buchanan's prime concern was safety and security; Ponting's main beef was that other s-word - sanctity. Zimbabwe had been fielding a "pretty ordinary side", he noted, and Test cricket's good name and elite playing standards were being dragged down.

Then Ponting said something else. "There are probably some teams playing Test cricket now," he speculated, "that aren't as strong as they would like to be." He meant in a cricketing sense, of course. He didn't realise how right, nor how close to home, he was.