Yesterday appeared to be the last chance for the ECB to attempt to engineer a conclusion to the Zimbabwe issue that would have placated everyone. The Government has requested that England do not play their match in Harare on February 13 and the players have made it clear that they would not ideally be batting on President Mugabe’s front lawn, yet the ECB defied all and went in to bat for no one.

The morning began with a global telephone conference call, chaired from Lord’s by Malcolm Speed, the ICC chief executive, hooking in the 15 members of the executive board. David Morgan, the chairman of the ECB, was linked in from Australia, where he is with the England team on its Ashes tour.

Speed first presented his report from his two-day fact-finding mission in Zimbabwe, in which he told the board that the security situation had indeed deteriorated. The ICC has always maintained that it would only reconsider Zimbabwe’s right to host World Cup games if security became questionable. However, Speed told the board that, despite this deterioration, he was still assured that players would be able to progress from airport, to hotel, to the cricket pitch and back again without their safety being put at risk. There will be 433 police officers dedicated to each match, he said, by way of evidence.

There was then the opportunity for debate. “It was open to any of the directors to seek the support of other directors to seek to relocate those matches,” Speed said. “Any of the members could have raised it and said: ‘We don’t wish these matches to go ahead’.”

It is perhaps unlikely that Morgan would have found sufficient support for a relocation, but here, nevertheless, was his chance. The ECB had previously stuck with ICC policy, despite a plea by the Government, because the alternative would have meant incurring a huge fine and because, it argued, it would have been wrong for the unity of the world game. Yet here was a chance to swing the vote democratically and without any financial penalty. Speed said, though, that “no member took advantage of the opportunity to ask the board to reconsider”.

And so we are back at square one, with the World Cup just a fortnight away and with six matches due to be played in a dictatorship where political opposition is repressed and where famine is rife because of self-inflicted land redistribution policies. The build-up to the tournament will continue to be dominated by non-cricketing issues because tension in Zimbabwe is only likely to increase and because the ICC can still not confirm whether Kenya, where two matches are due to be staged, is still considered a safe venue.

A decision will made late next week. The ICC needs more information before it can draw any conclusions, but the fact that it is still undecided is a statement in itself.

Yesterday afternoon, in a press conference in London, Speed addressed this unsatisfactory situation in the unflappable demeanour that is becoming his trademark. “Developing cricket in Africa and throughout the world is a very difficult project,” he said. “Cricket is played in dangerous places, let’s not beat about the bush about that. We would prefer that we could play cricket without the extensive security presence.”

He also made a passing nod to the plight of the starving millions — “We are aware of and have considerable sympathy for the people of Zimbabwe” — but added his trademark rejoinder that “our concern is for the safety of the players”. And he slipped in a thinly disguised barb towards the British Government when he gave a brief history of how Zimbabwe came to become World Cup hosts: “So no government should have been taken by surprise by its team’s commitment to play there.”

With the ICC’s position thus clear once again, the heat is back on Nasser Hussain and his England team. If anyone is going to stop them going to Zimbabwe now, it has to be themselves. However, they have made it clear already that they would rather not have to play politics and, even though the ECB has said in the past that it would countenance individuals taking a personal decision, on grounds of conscience, not to play in Harare, its own line has toughened considerably and the players might find it exceedingly hard to wriggle out of their World Cup contracts.

John Read, the ECB director of corporate affairs, insisted that the Zimbabwe issue was still not settled. “Today wasn’t the last opportunity to shift these matches,” he said. “Malcolm Speed has clearly said that these games could be shifted with four days to go. The decision made today is not necessarily the one for tomorrow.”