Morgan's victory overshadowed by greater truths

What a delicious twist to the Zimbabwe saga that it took a ham-fisted attack on the British media to persuade the mild-mannered David Morgan, the Neville Chamberlain of cricket, finally to look Robert Mugabe in the eye.

Morgan, a decent man in a difficult job, has to tread carefully with the media in his role as chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB). He has been even more circumspect with the man in charge of Zimbabwe.

What delight, then, to see Mugabe look away from Morgan when it mattered. Because that is what the ageing Zimbabwean autocrat did on Thursday, when he rescinded a ban on the 13 journalists he thought might embarrass his fiefdom with their no-doubt mischievous questions on England's blighted tour.

There followed confused celebrations. The tour was saved. A point was made about press freedom. A disconnected old man retreated to his tent, told by his aides that the world could now witness a normal cricket tour in a normal country.

Ultimately, though, what a steaming pile of hypocrisy all round. Another piece of horse manure in our time.

The party line, apparently agreed to by the ECB, was that the journalists were barred because of a technical hitch, an administrative cock-up. If you believe that, you will believe that Shane Warne is washed up.

The truth - as revealed in a rare moment of candour days earlier by George Charamba, the secretary for Zimbabwe's Ministry of Information - was decidedly more sinister. He told Agence France Presse: 'Bona fide media organisations in the UK have been cleared, but those that are political have not. This is a game of cricket, not politics.'

Even that is not the whole truth. Looking down the list, it is clear that the order was issued on a scattergun basis. Some of those allowed in had previously been excluded or banished, most notably The Guardian and Reuters, while The Independent and the Daily Mail (even though with different agendas) had also been strident critics. The Observer, incidentally, is still awaiting a reply.

Speaking with a Daily Telegraph executive last weekend, I was led to believe that their journalist Mihir Bose, who was deported on trumped-up charges in April, would not be going back this time 'unless he was sure of being kicked out again'.

Because that, sadly, is what this story has become: a game of ping-pong. A media circus. A stand-off between the sometimes pompous, mostly genuine defenders of press freedom and a regime intent on suppressing it.

How much cricket have you read about this past week? Who is in the Zimbabwe team, what are their strengths and weaknesses, will England open with Ian Bell or Kevin Pietersen? Yet this is the pretence. It is one sustained by arrogant and/or weak men on both sides, Old Empire men who can look away from the reality of starving and torture on the one hand and African revolutionaries who can justify and sanitise it on the other.

For years the men at Lord's have been deaf to suggestions by irritating writers that politics and sport are inseparable. They insisted that the subjugation of millions of people and the crackdown on free speech in Zimbabwe were nothing to do with them, nothing to do with cricket.

Similarly, they pretended that the grievances of a dozen or so white Zimbabwe cricketers who claimed they were being victimised by the government-controlled selectors was a sideshow, an internal matter. They imagined, like all men of authority who baulk at hard decisions, that doing nothing was the best option.

They used the weasel language of the compromised. They were 'disappointed'. They were 'exasperated'. They were 'frustrated'. But they were rarely angry. They claimed against all logic that the only criteria for not touring were safety or a directive from the British government.

At first glance, it seemed that on Tuesday night Morgan finally acknowledged they could no longer ignore the truth.

What unfolded in succeeding days was more revealing. The clue was in the history. Why had he and his predecessors not been similarly indignant about many earlier restrictions imposed on British journalists, going back as far as 2000, not to mention the long-term harassment of those brave colleagues trying every day to tell the truth in Zimbabwe, many of them risking torture and death?

The first suspicion is that it was the number of people banned and the accompanying headlines written by interested parties, rather than the principle that forced the ECB's hand. Would they have reacted were it just one journalist excluded? Probably not. But maybe they were already working out a backroom deal, a face-saving climbdown and a 'form of words'. Why else did Morgan stay in Harare when the team were holed up in Johannesburg?

You have to have some sympathy for Morgan. He has been dealing with an intransigent and hostile antagonist, a seriously dangerous foe. And it took a player removed from the drama, one strengthened by his proximity to retirement, to articulate what Morgan could not. Graham Thorpe said, simply, that it was 'a fiasco'. Others, such as Steve Harmison and, last year, the Australian Stuart MacGill, have also let their consciences speak.

As in any country riven by political and social unrest, there are competing truths. There are those who swear Mugabe was not always like this, that he was a champion of freedom, that he is actually a lover of cricket and (this I believe) that the Zimbabwe Cricket Union have done a lot of good work in spreading the game to the black population once shamefully marginalised by the white minority.

But Zimbabwe is now a country on its knees, one governed by a man initially fired by revolutionary zeal and subsequently reduced to the parody of a bully blind to the needs of those among his people who oppose him and beyond criticism from craven subordinates.

With deafness and blindness invariably goes silence, the three monkeys who live on the back of the morally impotent.

Morgan argued in his quiet, word-picking way on Friday that the ECB were in a bind, that they had a duty to their own constituency, to the thousands of cricketers here who depend on the international success of the England team to fund the game. All true.

How unfortunate that this truth should override the more important ones, the truths unfolding in Zimbabwe, against all the wishes of Mugabe and with the acquiescence of the ECB.

Leaders of the Mugabe mould are usually blessed with peerless cunning and an instinct for survival. Over time, though, they invariably descend into a paranoid mess. How else could Mugabe imagine he could fool the world into believing he was the aggrieved party in all this, besieged by evil agents of MI5 masquerading as Mihir Bose and Christopher Martin-Jenkins?

Now, after that unfortunate interlude, back to the cricket.