CI deny pressure to move tour to Zimbabwe

CRICKET IRELAND chief executive Warren Deutrom has denied that outside influences had any bearing on the decision of the national team to travel to Zimbabwe later this month for a series of games against the African nation.

The four-day Intercontinental Cup game and three One-Day Internationals were originally scheduled to be played in South Africa, but will now take place in Harare. The Ireland team will depart on September 17th.

The International Cricket Council (ICC) contacted Cricket Ireland (CI) at the beginning of May to inform them Zimbabwe believed it was no longer justifiable to play home matches anywhere other than Zimbabwe, and asked if Ireland would consider travelling to play the games.

At the time, CI, which governs the game on an all-island basis, contacted the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) in Dublin and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London to seek advice on the safety and security implications of making the trip.

“Back in 2008, the advice was that we shouldn’t travel from a safety and security perspective,” said Deutrom.

“From a political perspective, playing cricket in Zimbabwe wasn’t something that Cricket Ireland would have even contemplated at that stage.

“However, when we received the message from the ICC, and there was certainly no diktat from them, it was simply a reasonable question about what is the situation with your governments and would you be able to go back and check.

“We received information from the FCO and the DFA in June that they had no objection to us going.”

Since then, however, the FCO in London have changed their stance, leading to the announcement yesterday that Scotland have abandoned their trip to Zimbabwe later this year.

Deutrom was not surprised by their decision, but as the Department of Foreign Affairs still have no objections, the Ireland trip will go ahead.

“Cricket Ireland had made entirely its own decision on this. Of course we had to take the ICC’s own views, or what the international cricketing fraternity is doing, with India and Sri Lanka’s recent tours there.

“Clearly, that movement towards normalisation, certainly of cricketing structures in Zimbabwe, and of course the movement towards normalisation of political structures, meant it was something that we were duty bound to investigate ourselves,” he said.

As part of that process, Ireland players, team management and officials met Zimbabwe sports minister David Coltart, a co-founder of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which has formed the Unity government with president Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party.

The meeting in Belfast was held earlier this month, and Deutrom believes concerns over both the rehabilitation of the game in Zimbabwe and safety issues for the travelling party were addressed satisfactorily by Coltart.

“There were a number of questions at the meeting relating to safety and security on the ground, relating to the situation with hotels and hospitals. I raised all of these with the minister and asked him to explain his views on that,” said Deutrom.

“He also talked about the situation in the country and his own views about how he feels Zimbabwe is very similar to that in South Africa in the early 90s, when South Africa’s sporting teams were readmitted to international competition while the apartheid regime was still in power.”

The trip will see Ireland coach Phil Simmons return to Zimbabwe for the first time since he was sacked by the country in 2005.

Simmons has taken legal action against Cricket Zimbabwe in a bid to recover the $400,000 (€315,000) in salary he was due in the remaining two years of his contract.

Deutrom was quick to point out everything possible has been done to make Simmons’ return as stress-free as possible.

“He obviously had some concerns, Phil’s previous position was that he certainly had no intention of going back to Zimbabwe,” said Deutrom.

“I’m guessing this has come a little bit earlier than he would have wanted, but we’ve made sure he has as much comfort in terms of his decision to go.

“I’ve spoken to him about this and he does genuinely believe that the situation has moved on significantly from when he was there, even from the situation two years ago.”