Richard Boock: White men don't rule cricket any more

Before this gets any more embarrassing, could someone please tell Phil Goff that Bradman's dead, Boycott's retired, and that the white man doesn't run the game of cricket any more.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs might know something about politics, but his latest stance on the upcoming Zimbabwe tour reveals a wafer-thin understanding of the International Cricket Council and particularly its dislike of white moralists.

If it's true that Goff intends to join Australian counterpart Alex Downer and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to lobby the ICC on the issue of touring Zimbabwe, then he threatens to make a laughing stock of us all.

And that's no easy task when the real picture is the ugly and nauseating landscape unfolding in Zimbabwe.

But the idea that the ICC's majority anti-white voting bloc, who fought for decades to break the shackles of their colonial masters, will suddenly be brought to heel by these three crusading knights is at the very best naive.

For goodness sake, the ICC isn't run by stuffy Brits any more, it's run by the combined weight of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, South Africa, the West Indies and Zimbabwe.

If anyone doubts this they should consider that the ICC headquarters are soon being uprooted from London and being shifted to Dubai.

Ironically, one of the first priorities for the New Order was to tighten the contractual criteria for touring teams and to set steep penalties for any breaches - the very clause that Goff wants waived.

It's mind-boggling I know, but does he really believe that Pakistan cricket authorities will agree to teams not fulfilling their touring obligations on moral or political grounds?

Does he really expect support from Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, the West Indies and India?

Maybe if he had won the backing of South African Foreign Minister Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, India's Minister of External Affairs Natwar Singh, or Pakistan's Khurshid M. Kasuri, he could have presented a more non-partisan face.

But petitioning the ICC with Goff, Downer and Straw? They might as well arrive wearing pith helmets.

New Zealand's cricketers already have a questionable record in terms of pulling out of tours for security reasons, and their refusal to play a 2003 World Cup game in Nairobi still rankles with the ICC, Kenya, and tournament hosts South Africa.

The thought that they will now start picking and choosing on political grounds (a can of worms if ever there was one) will serve only to make them look more precious and small-town.

But - and here's the twist - to do it while we actively pursue a free-trade agreement with China, support the illegal regime of Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf, play cricket in the brutal police environment of Guyana, and tour Tamil-persecuted Sri Lanka, is a hypocrisy of Capill-like proportions.

Hopefully, Goff will be told this before he goes knocking on the ICC's door, behind which lies one of the most anti-Anglo-Saxon sporting organisations ever convened.

Only then will we be spared our blushes.