The ZIMBABWE Situation | Our
thoughts and prayers are with Zimbabwe - may peace, truth and justice prevail. |
Streak remains defiant in the
wilderness
By Scyld
Berry
(Filed:
05/12/2004)
Life still isn't bad at Heath Streak's farm. While Zimbabwe's youthful players have been losing every game against England, their finest bowler has been watching a paradise fly-catcher - little larger than a humming-bird - nesting in a tree in his garden.
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As Streak and his wife Nadine are expecting their third child in January, he can empathise as he sits on the verandah which he has built beneath the paradise fly-catcher's tree. From his hill-top house, beside granite outcrops, he looks down towards the watering hole which has remained faithful through every drought. "See the wildebeest," he said, pointing at dark specks in the distance. "Giraffe came early this morning before the lightning scared them.'
The legs above and below Streak's slightly dodgy knees are thicker than branches of the shading tree. The Zimbabwean needs just 186 runs to become only the 12th player in the game's Test history to score 2,000 runs and take 200 wickets, and he is still only 30. Without Streak, who has taken three times as many Test wickets as any other Zimbabwe bowler, the country will be unable to justify the restoration of Test status next year. Yet when two leading officials from Zimbabwe Cricket came to Streak's farm in October, they could not tempt Achilles from his tent.
Rain during the night has greened up the 8,000 acres which are left of Streak's farm after the land resettlement programme accounted for the other 24,000 acres. Inside the stone farmhouse his 12-year-old daughter Holly has baked chocolate brownies on the first day of her Christmas holidays. While we eat them, the wind which puffs the verandah is warm. You can see why the fly-catcher decided to swap her original home for this bush an hour or so's drive from Bulawayo.
Seven years ago, when England made their first Test tour of Zimbabwe, the road from Bulawayo was not so bare of traffic as it is now. Nor did it have two roadblocks, at which police searched our car for guns. But the most telling sight en route was how at every wayside store and shelter men and women sat, and sat; and this was not Africa conserving energy in the heat, but people starting each day without employment.
Last Sunday morning in Harare no demonstrations occurred at the ground where England played. A kilometre away, however, a crowd of thousands queued around three sides of the huge government building that is the passport office. Not a political demonstration, but it said as much about the politics of Zimbabwe as the official admissions in last week's newspapers that GDP had contracted by 30 per cent in the last four years and that inflation earlier this year stood at 600 per cent.
There surely had to be some decolonisation. When England made their one and only Test tour, a former Zimbabwe Test cricketer ran a hotel in the highlands where the African workers were allowed home only three days a month - even mothers and fathers who were forced to leave their children at home. But whatever the current political theory, this country is not keeping enough people employed and nourished; or as Streak says: "Zimbabwe's cricket is reflective of the situation as a whole." In translation, almost all of those in power have dirty secrets.
What does Streak want before he will return to Test cricket and act as the experienced all-rounder whom the youngsters can bat and bowl around instead of going in circles? Some observers, though not this one, called Streak an appeaser when he remained his country's captain through the transformation process which started in 2000 and was meant to achieve racial integration (and Zimbabwe's cricket is far more integrated than South Africa's, where no African batsman made a first-class hundred until 2002-3). But now he is less appeaseable than Achilles.
"I've consistently said that before I return Max Ebrahim (convenor of national selectors inter alia) and Ozias Bvute (acting managing director of Zimbabwe Cricket) have to be made accountable for their behaviour. In my view they shouldn't be involved in any capacity in cricket in this country.
"After the 1999 World Cup [when Zimbabwe's best-ever side qualified for the Super Six stage, and England didn't] more money came into our game, and more sponsorships, but was that money used wisely? Definitely not.
"I guess the equivalent of US$150,000 was spent on sending 11 or 12 Board members on our last tour of Australia. That's all expenses paid and allowances and business-class airfares as only a couple were guests of Cricket Australia. Now it's normal for one or two Board members to go on tour but not all at once.
"Then you look at some clubs here, even at the top level, which are collapsing. Queen's, a national first-team club, couldn't fulfil a fixture because they didn't have enough cricket bats, only one that wasn't broken. All this money is being squandered."
Even though he is still sitting on the verandah, Streak is now coming in off his long run. "I don't have a problem with the concept of assisting young black players to get to the top, it's the manner in which the Board do it. All the young black guys in the team like Tatenda Taibu have come through privileged schools [one 12-boy dorm at Churchill school in Harare contained Taibu, Stuart Matsikenyeri and Hamilton Masakadza]. To me that's not a reflection of a development programme.
"My other issue is that these guys [Bvute and Ebrahim] are happy for two or three of us to return, because they need that experience base, and the rest to move on." Streak is referring to the 15 white dissidents who were sacked by the Board this summer, of whom only two have gone back. "I think deep down they'd rather be playing for their country but they've been unemployed for a certain period and have had to seek it elsewhere.
"Take a guy like Ray Price [the left-arm spinner who has signed for Worcestershire as a Kolpak player]. Say he gets £50,000 from Worcestershire, he's not going to get half that here - and he's got a guaranteed future in county cricket until his career ends." Last year Streak, as far as he knows, became the first player to be granted anything longer than a one-year contract by the Zimbabwe Board. (Ebrahim is also the Board's director of human resources, which Streak says is a conflict of interest.)
It is probably an irretrievable mess, beyond the capacity of ICC to sort out. Just as all good Zimbabwean footballers emigrate to South Africa or Europe, so have almost all the good Zimbabwean cricketers emigrated, except for Streak who feels tied to the land (his great grandfather bought his farm in the 1890s). That wretched Kolpak ruling has already enabled five of Zimbabwe's dissidents to sign up for county cricket, on condition they never play outside England: it does nothing for county cricket and lowers Zimbabwe's standard even further.
Streak himself will be all right, even if he is unable to fulfil his Test ambition of reaching 3,000 runs and 300 wickets (last week Shaun Pollock was fifth to that landmark). He has a two-year contract with Warwickshire - as their overseas player, not a Kolpak - with the option of a third, after assisting them to the championship last season. And a few tourists with American dollars still come to the farm to shoot game with guns or cameras.
If all families are unhappy in their own way, something is still familiar about the relationship between Britain and Zimbabwe, or at least their Governments. Britain is in the role of a single parent, perhaps a bereaved widow; while Zimbabwe is the 24-year-old (independence was in 1980), wilful enough to want to do things its own way, whatever the mistakes, and however totalitarian the regime. It is a love-hate relationship, the hatred so bitter perhaps because the love was so intense, for this is a naturally blessed place: no sea, no beaches, but as delicious as anywhere inland on earth. And cricket is trapped in the middle of this irreconcilable breakdown.