CA crumbles, drops Howard nomination: Cricket Australia's misjudged power-play

[achilles]

Knock Knock Gideon Haigh

[yoda]

Those people who think Sharad Pawar has "experience" and "capacity" to be ICC president... Subah'nallah... :hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical: He is an embarrassment.

Well for you our entire country is an embarrassment :hehe:

[The Outsider]

Why does he have to bring the decisions Howard made as PM when dismissing his candidature ? Not that the writer is in a position to judge, the guy is an anthropologist (studies humanity) by profession Whatever decisions Howard made as PM, they were popular enough to get him re - elected.

Isn't Howard the same guy who did not find anything wrong with the government taking away kids from parents based on their skin color to apologize? Howard :

In some cases, children were wrongly removed, in other cases they were removed for good reason, in other cases they were given up and in other cases, the judgement on the removal is obscure or difficult to make

Isn't Howard the same guy who opposed sanctions against apartheid South Africa and supported them against Zimbabwe? Why do you need to be qualified in any profession to judge a person like Howard?

[achilles]

Howard is a man caught in his own words. Whats bad for him is that no one is ready to forgive him at this point in time, for all the wrong decisions he's taken in the past.

[maverick.rules]

What was Cricket Australia thinking? by Mukul Kesavan It's best to begin by explaining what the rejection of John Howard's nomination to the ICC isn't about. It isn't about John Howard's competence: every ICC administrator for a decade has ranged from bad to terrible. The ICC's role in creating match referees, in botching the chucking rule, in inventing the Super Test, and looking on as Twenty20 destroyed cricket's calendar, is so appalling that to argue that Howard is disqualified because of his lack of experience in cricket administration is laughable. Apart from having run a country, Howard actually likes cricket, which is more than you can say for Pawar. That must count for something. Anyone who loves Test cricket and realises that cricket needs a calendar with reliable highlights that fans can look forward to, will acknowledge that Cricket Australia is the best-administered board in world cricket. The Boxing Day Test, the splendid stadiums, the happy spectators, the first-rate Channel 9 coverage, the sports science that Australian universities have pioneered, make Australia a cricketing nation to be admired and emulated, not reviled. So despite the wretched record of the two Malcolms (Speed and Gray), an Australian in charge of world cricket seems, in the abstract, slightly more reassuring than the prospect of an Indian or a Pakistani. That said, I couldn't believe my eyes when I first read that Australia and New Zealand had nominated Australia's former prime minister for the vice-presidency of the ICC. There had been talk of him being interested in the job, but I hadn't taken the gossip seriously. Then it became bonafide news and I thought: what were they thinking? Did the cricket boards of Australia and New Zealand imagine that John Howard's candidature would fly? A politician whose policies towards immigrants and aboriginal Australians felt like White Australia warmed over, a charter member of the Anglophone empire that led the coalition of the willing into Iraq and Afghanistan, George Bush's go-to-guy down under, the embodiment of everything thin-skinned post-colonial elites love to hate, and Cricket Australia's strategists thought they could shoe-horn him into the vice-presidency and subsequently the presidency of the ICC? The more you think about it, the odder it seems. Think of the timing of this, both in terms of cricket's history and the recent past. At a time when cricket's centre of gravity, for better or worse, has shifted to South Asia, some antipodean genius decides that a retired reactionary best known in South Asia for using his prime ministerial pulpit to trash Muralitharan on the eve of a Sri Lankan tour of Australia was the best man available for Australia's turn at the helm. Incidentally, Howard was one of those cartoon neanderthals who actually opposed the one great political cause in the game's history, the cricketing boycott of South Africa. This man, who through a long career has embodied reaction, was meant to show the corrupt elites of world cricket the way forward. There were times during George W Bush's presidency when America made appointments designed to rub the world's face in the dirt. One such appointment was Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank, the other was John Bolton as America's representative to the United Nations. Apart from that comfortable club of nations that constitutes the Anglophone empire (who believed that these were just the men to cleanse corrupt international institutions), most other countries were appalled that men as intemperately ideological as these were being foisted on a riven world system that needed intelligence and collegiality. If Cricket Australia was concerned about reforming the ICC, it ought to have supported New Zealand's John Anderson. It would have been impossible for the BCCI's bosses to oppose his candidature and it would have put an honest man on top of world cricket. By nominating Howard they gave the BCCI a gift: an opportunity to put Cricket Australia in its place. To reject a bogeyman like John Howard is cost-free: no opinion-maker, no constituency that's valuable or important to India's gang of "honorary" administrators, will oppose that decision. Nor should they: George Bush and his hangers-on have had their day - having half-wrecked the world, they shouldn't be allowed to rampage around cricket in their retirement. Howard's most plausible supporter has been the Australian writer, Gideon Haigh, who has written a three-part defence in Cricinfo in which he first examined the case against Howard and found it wanting, then reconstructed the timeline of Howard's nomination and found the response to it inconsistent and self-serving and finally showed his readers how undemocratic and void of process the ICC and its constituent boards are. For Indians committed to cricket, specially Test cricket, the rottenness of cricket administration in general, and India's cricket administration in particular, isn't news. What is news is the spectacle of someone like Haigh, a liberal critic, quick-stepping around Howard's record on race and then coming up with absolution. Howard, according to Haigh, is just a modern populist pol who tries to be all things to all men, and people who call him racist are telling us more about themselves than they are about Howard. Also, Howard couldn't have been so bad because Australia became more diverse on his watch than it was before. (This is a little like arguing that Aurangzeb was more tolerant of religious difference than Akbar was because there were more non-Muslim mansabdars in his administration than there were in Akbar's. Nice try, won't fly.) Haigh knows Australia's politics more intimately than any Indian, and perhaps within the political spectrum of that country, Howard's positions are seen as venerably conservative instead of racist. Democratic nations construct their own political common sense as they're entitled to do. But when they try to export their politicians on to an international stage, they must expect to be judged by political opinion shaped by histories other than their own. For Haigh, Howard is a senior conservative politician, a former prime minister, ambushed by thuggish Asian and African elites; for most Indian cricket fans, BCCI officials, time-servers though they are, did us all a favour by nixing a neo-conservative thug who helped aid and abet more death and destruction in the world than any office-bearer of the ICC. They did it for their own, time-serving reasons, but they did the right thing. In the Australian imagination, neo-imperialist wars might seem distant games played by armed touring sides, but for most countries that make up the ICC, they are reminders of a past that they want to see conclusively buried. In trying to set cricket's world to rights using Bush's playbook for reordering the world system, Cricket Australia over-reached. It forgot that for John "Bolton" Howard's nomination to succeed, Australia needed to be cricket's solitary hyperpower, which it isn't, and this is an odd oversight given how much time Australians spend complaining about the Indian ascendancy. If the Australians want to rein in the BCCI, they might want to confer with the Kiwis and come up with an alternative candidate, someone with a resumé more collegial than Genghis Khan's. To first nominate Howard and then claim that his rejection threatens to divide cricket's world along racial lines, is to deal in a low form of passive aggression. If Australia and New Zealand stand by this nomination and England backs them, cricket's historians will write that Howard's candidature was the gambit in the "Old" Commonwealth's secession from international cricket. Link: http://www.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/466271.html?addata=col_mod

[achilles]

Wonderful read from Mukul.

[EnterTheVoid]

Isn't Howard the same guy who did not find anything wrong with the government taking away kids from parents based on their skin color to apologize?

Errrrrrr, so what ? His position was that the current generation should not be held accountable for the mistakes of the of the past, hence the refusal to apologize or offer compensation. Why should I be hounded for an apology or compensation for something my forefathers did that I had no responsibility or power over ?

Isn't Howard the same guy who opposed sanctions against apartheid South Africa and supported them against Zimbabwe?

Once again, so what ? Whatever decisions he made, he did not make them unilaterally, he had the support of his colleagues and support of the public, who thought he was doing a good enough job to re elect him again.

Why do you need to be qualified in any profession to judge a person like Howard?

Well than, what position are you in to judge Howard's candidature ? You answered your question here.

[The Outsider]

Errrrrrr, so what ? His position was that the current generation should not be held accountable for the mistakes of the of the past, hence the refusal to apologize or offer compensation. Why should I be hounded for an apology or compensation for something my forefathers did that I had no responsibility or power over ?

He defends a clearly racist position and policy by saying that in certain cases it was good for the state to take away kids of a specific race. So what? I guess nothing if you condone racism, but it certainly makes him unsuitable for the job of an organization which is a melee of races.

Once again, so what ? Whatever decisions he made, he did not make them unilaterally, he had the support of his colleagues and support of the public, who thought he was doing a good enough job to re elect him again.

How can the ICC feel comfortable having someone who accords sanctions against one country and not against another purely on the basis of which race is committing the atrocity as it's head? Well, if Australia elected him, so what? Laloo Yadav regularly gets elected - I suppose he has also never done any wrong.

Well than, what position are you in to judge Howard's candidature ? You answered your question here.

I can certainly have an opinion on his candidature. As for judging it is concerned, it's already been done and dusted and the racist has been put in his rightful place. Don't forget to elect him the next time as your Prime Minister if he decides to contest again. :hatsoff:

[youngindia]

Why should I be hounded for an apology or compensation for something my forefathers did that I had no responsibility or power over ?

This is political naivette. its about politics, not you. certainly a decision made by a govt even in 1949 can have a bearing on the current govt even today.(e.g treaties) and he personally tried to paint that abhoorrent practice "gray". its despicable. and you appear too absorbed in your one point agenda to even read the damning quotes here. or you would not be so stupid to type "so what".

Whatever decisions he made, he did not make them unilaterally, he had the support of his colleagues and support of the public, who thought he was doing a good enough job to re elect him again.

again the basics. the leaders sets the tone for his supporters and followers. so if he got support from his blind supporters, does that make it right? even if 5 million people say "racism can be overlooked", its WRONG.

[EnterTheVoid]

He defends a clearly racist position and policy by saying that in certain cases it was good for the state to take away kids of a specific race. So what? I guess nothing if you condone racism' date=' but it certainly makes him unsuitable for the job of an organization which is a melee of races.[/quote'] You didn't answer my question: Why should I held be accountable for something I did not commit ? Why should my tax dollars be used for compensation for something I had no involvement in whatsoever ? These are the ground realities. Please sort these out before talking the moral high ground; What he did was absolutely necessary, to stop the floodgates to a plethora of lawsuits, compensations etc to which the average Joe like yours truly would be forced to pick up the tab.

How can the ICC feel comfortable having someone who accords sanctions against one country and not against another purely on the basis of which race is committing the atrocity as it's head?

Sanctions against Mugabe was a collective decision taken by the boards of Australia, England and South Africa. Howard was not even on the board who authorized the sanctions, he merely voiced his support of it. The ICC is devoid of any moral authority, cheats, crooks and money launderers once held high positions of authority (Jagmohan Dalmiya anyone ?). Electing a member who simply voiced his agreement over sanctions against a dictator is the last of their worries.

I can certainly have an opinion on his candidature. As for judging it is concerned, it's already been done and dusted and the racist has been put in his rightful place. Don't forget to elect him the next time as your Prime Minister if he decides to contest again.

National Interests come first. If he takes decisions that are in the interests of the everyday man, than I'd vote for him time and time again.

[yoda]

Unrelated rant....

He opposed South Africa's exclusion from World cricket. Is that Racist in your opinion? He called Murali a chucker even though the ICC had cleared him. Why would he want to head a body which he has no respect for?

[EnterTheVoid]

He opposed South Africa's exclusion from World cricket. Is that Racist in your opinion?

I am not in a position of authority so whether I agree or disagree has no bearing on the outcome of current proceedings. Whatever decisions he made, he had his reasons. I see no need for me to "justify" his actions.

He called Murali a chucker even though the ICC had cleared him. Why would he want to head a body which he has no respect for?

He told you that ? Murali is a bad example: I am fully convinced his rejection was politically motivated. Otherwise, I so need to bring in the stolen generation, apartheid South Africa etc etc

[EnterTheVoid]

He opposed South Africa's exclusion from World cricket. Is that Racist in your opinion?

Why should the average cricket fan be deprived of cricket because of the actions of the government By that logic, England's membership should be rescinded since they are (illegal) occupying powers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[yoda]

Why should the average cricket fan be deprived of cricket because of the actions of the government

Which average fan was deprived of cricket? The racist whites of South Africa? They were part of the problem, not just the government. Don't tell me you are talking about depriving the blacks of South Africa of watching cricket cause they were deprived of more than that :giggle:

By that logic, England's membership should be rescinded since they are (illegal) occupying powers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So should Australia then as they were part of the "Coalition of the willing". And let's ban India as well since Pakistan thinks RAW was responsible for the recent bombings in Pakistan. :hehe:

[Zap_Brannigan]

Why should the average cricket fan be deprived of cricket because of the actions of the government

That explains why he supported Zimbabwe .....Oh wait....

[EnterTheVoid]

Which average fan was deprived of cricket? The racist whites of South Africa? They were part of the problem' date=' not just the government. Don't tell me you are talking about depriving the blacks of South Africa of watching cricket cause they were deprived of more than that[/quote'] This doesn't answer my question.

[EnterTheVoid]

That explains why he supported Zimbabwe .....Oh wait....

The sanctions against South Africa and those against Zimbabwe were almost two decades apart. Times change, circumstances change, circumstances dictated the action that was taken.

[Zap_Brannigan]

The sanctions against South Africa and those against Zimbabwe were almost two decades apart. Times change' date=' circumstances change, circumstances dictated the action that was taken.[/quote'] Like what circumstances? One being blacks getting discriminated against and the other being white being discriminated?? That can't be it. Even bush wouldn't do that. But he was applying for a job for which his entire career acts as a resume. If Mugabe was selected by Africa when their times comes to select, would we look past his decisions?

[yoda]

This doesn't answer my question.

That's because you don't read the answer. :winky:

[Desi Cartman]

TBH he isnt as bad as he made to look. He by nature is very unapologetic , he has refused to apologize for children overboard , stolen generations , Iraq war. sree, his problem was that he interfered in cricket when he shouldnt have and as a result he has only enemies and no friends , heck even Kiwis dont like him. He is racist because he doesnt agree that the Aussie Govt was wrong for the oppression of the aborigines and heck he doesnt even accept that what happened was completely wrong. I dont have much respect for him