A poll conducted by the News24 website recently called for South Africa's cricket to Zimbabwe next month to be cancelled and, what's more, for a full range of sanctions to be slapped on Robert Mugabe as quickly as possible.

The first point to be made, of course, is that internet polls are famously unreliable. News24 admits that its own poll is unscientific and the reason for this is that the respondents tend to be a group of, usually, likeminded people who all feel the same way about the same thing.

Nevertheless, the weight of the poll result – something like over 80 percent or over 1 000 respondents – prompted News24 to get on to the United Cricket Board about it. UCB spokesperson Bronwyn Wilkinson played a dead bat to the query, reiterating the UCB's position that only instructions from the South African government or the Zimbabwe cricket authorities would prompt it to reconsider this stance with the obvious provision that the safety of the players was paramount.

As things stand, there is no indication that the South African team would be in any danger in Zimbabwe next month. Violence has tended to be restricted to rural areas and as much as Mugabe as torn up the Zimbabwe constitution in an attempt to stay in power, it seems most unlikely than Shaun Pollock and his team would witness, let along been subject to, any violence.

There are two basic arguments for South Africa to press ahead with the tour. The first is that it would be daft for the UCB to contradict South African government policy towards Zimbabwe whether it, the readers of News24 or anyone else for that matter agrees with this policy or not. In recent weeks both the president of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union, Peter Chingoka, and, more significantly, the leader of the Zimbabwe opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai, have appealed for the tour to go ahead.

Tsvangirai made the point succinctly. "Although there is a crisis in this country, it would be unfair to punish sportsmen for a situation they cannot control," he said. "They should be allowed to pursue their activities. Cancelling tours would hurt only them, and no one else."

In other words even if South Africa, and England who are due in Zimbabwe later this year, pulled out, it wouldn't make the blind bit of difference to Mugabe.

Secondly, there is a very real prospect that if South Africa and England cancelled, Zimbabwe cricket might go into a financial tailspin from which it could never recover. The game struggles to survive in Zimbabwe and is almost completely dependent on the revenue generated by the sale of television rights. If South Africa and England backed out, there is a very real possibility that there would be no cricket of any significance played in Zimbabwe in five years' time.

There's a third point, too. Should the UCB, or any sporting body, be in the business of making political or diplomatic points or allowing itself to be used for this purpose. Let's turn this one around. It would be fascinating to know, if it were possible to transport the News24 respondents back 15 years, how many of them were fully behind the sports boycott of South Africa. What's that? Don't mix politics and sport? Oh, alright then.

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