"In Zimbabwe," The Economist commented last week, "the thieves are in charge, and the victims face prosecution." The victims - the benighted population - have now been deprived of yet another source of solace with thecancellation of Australia's planned cricket tour.

Cricket tours have been cancelled for political reasons before. After all, the very first English touring party, the Duke of Dorset's team bound for France in 1789, never got beyond Dover thanks to the French Revolution: a rare case of the end of reign stopping play.

Yet usually - notably in the case of South Africa through the 1970s and 1980s - this has been about trying to bring pressure to bear on a reprehensible regime. Not here: the question in this case, as the Australian Cricket Board expresses it, is of uncertain "player safety".

It is just as well that the ACB steered round the political shoals in this matter, notwithstanding the slightly dotty remarks of Australia's foreign minister Alexander Downer that the tour might "send the wrong message" to Zimbabwe's nakedly corrupt president Robert Mugabe - as though Mugabe listens to messages at all these days.

Cricket teams may play under national banners but they are not arms of government. An Australian cricket team touring Zimbabwe would no more have been a condoning of Mugabe's gangsterism than an Australian athletics team visiting Malaysia would have amounted to endorsement of the imprisonment of Anwar Ibrahim.

Whether the ACB is justified in querying the security arrangements for the tour, however, is questionable. No ACB official has visited Zimbabwe since last September. It is true that Australia's department of foreign affairs has issued a proforma travel-advice warning to those intending to visit Zimbabwe. But it has not recommended that Australians already in the country leave: in fact, there are a good many Australian tourists in Zimbabwe at present. Their trips have been slightly disrupted by shortages of food and fuel, but nobody seems to be taking pot-shots at them.

The position of a touring cricketer - a visiting VIP - would surely be even more secure. Indeed, it would have been manifestly in Mugabe's interest for the tour to proceed smoothly. The Australian cricketers could have taken advantage of this in order to show some solidarity with their Zimbabwean peers, who after all are part of the oppressed in a country where income per person has halved in five years of breathtaking misrule. The unkind might conjecture that the ACB decision involves the question of player comfort as much as that of safety, that cricketers these days are loath to go anywhere they can't order a good club sandwich from room service and be guaranteed a decent hotel movie channel.

In some ways, however, the column inches and screen time that the will-they-won't-they debate about the tour has consumed in this country reflect that native Australian talent for being unable to see the wood for the trees. The real issue here is that what was once one of Africa's wealthiest countries has been starved and ruined by a tyrant with no policy but his own aggrandisement, and that the world has stood by and done nothing (and, in the case of South Africa and Kenya, cheered him on). It's hard to expect courage from cricketers when it has been in such short supply elsewhere.

Gideon Haigh is a former editor of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack Australia and the author of several books including The Summer Game. His latest, The Big Ship, is a biography of Warwick Armstrong.

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