Politics and Cricket: Like Peanut Butter and Chocolate
by Devanshu Mehta
The English players once blanched at being made to shake hands with Robert Mugabe. This Saturday they will be expected to play against a man [Jayasuriya] who is a direct representative of a government accused of war crimes on a horrific scale by the United Nations. The politics of the matter is not outside the ground or behind a metal fence any more. It is right there in the middle of the pitch and it cannot be ignored.
Ouch. As Jarrod Kimber said last week:
No one can bring politics into cricket, they’re already here.
Of course, this guilty-by-association-with-perpetrators-of-alleged-past-crimes logic would leave a lot of people and a lot of countries out of sport. I’m not saying we should ignore it, but just that beware of the standards you set for others. You may not like it when they’re applied uniformly.
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Deep Backward Point 
I agree; it’s a bit silly on Bull’s part to compare Robert Mugabe with Jayasuriya. As you note, the slope gets slippery the more you climb on it; technically, aren’t all Sri Lankan cricket players representatives of their country?
The answer, however, isn’t to banish politics completely from sport, which, as you say, is impossible, and — knowing the history of apartheid — not always virtuous. Sometimes, it’s possible to send a signal through sports, and that should be done when the stakes are high enough.
And didn’t all the Indian, U.S. and U.K. governments give a pass to Sri Lanka during its conflict with the LTTE? It’s somewhat strange Bull feels the U.K. government should make its point about Sri Lanka on the cricket pitch, when his own government (largely) turned a blind eye.