England’s shameful betrayal of Pakistan

Any English person with a love of cricket knows life has its ups and downs. But until now we have had no need to feel truly ashamed. The decision by England to scrap a mini-tour of Pakistan feels like one of those watershed moments from which any reputation for fair play will never recover. The men’s tour would have been four or five days at most, to play a couple of T20s. It’s hardly a trek across the Antarctic.

And this against Pakistan, a country which, more than any, needs international cricket at home. And a country which bailed England out last year, when Britain was in the grip of Covid, by playing a series of Test matches that did so much to keep the game alive. Now we can’t be bothered to honour an agreement to pay a brief visit there. It is a disgrace.

Quite how this happened is not that easy to disentangle. The journalist Peter Oborne has no doubt it was ECB chairman Ian Watmore, and savaged ‘invisible Ian’ ferociously on Sky News. Certainly the ECB statement waffled vaguely about ‘player wellbeing and mental health’, suggested security might be an issue (it wasn’t) and ducked behind a hint that Covid bubbles might be the reason.

Come off it. It’s only a few days, and the Pakistanis were here for months in a bubble, and not in the Mandarin Oriental either. ‘Wellbeing and mental health’ matter hugely of course, and will probably crop up again in discussions about the forthcoming Ashes. Is it so different from what some used to call ‘homesickness’ at school, though admittedly without the extra hazard of a 90mph Pat Cummins bouncer heading for your throat?

Is it player power? Nothing wrong with players being better treated, but they too must balance their own interests with the wider cricket community.