TBH, there's plenty of places I'd not be sorry to see excluded - have sporting sanctions taken against them. Zimbabwe, obviously, as I've been saying for the past 4 years or so, is once such example. China (for instance) is not, because as has been said
ad nauseum, it's a reality - not a pleasant one, no, but a reality that it'd be fruitless to deny - that China has enough power to basically do what it wants, and woe betide anyone who attempts to oppose them. See the Beijing Olympics.
Matthew Engel, as so often, put it well in his
Wisden 2005 notes:
It is true that it's all too easy to get on one's high-horse about this. I could have a decent stab at writing a powerful newspaper column arguing the moral case against playing cricket anywhere you care to name, however innocuous it may sound (even New Zealand has dirty little secrets, you know. The UK certainly has). But somewhere in the dust, by no means easy to find, is a line no decent human-being should cross. And I believe the wretched tyranny that is Robert Mugabe's govornment is now accross that line and no cricket team should tour there.
As I've said - my knowledge of Apartheid is not particularly complex, but I am well aware that in cricket circles things were on the change by the 1970s and 1980s.
However, one thing I'd say is that, while the ban on SA may have been little more than a cheap trick used by lazy policy makers to have others do their fighting for them rather than use the correct channels, that doesn't mean it was neccessarily a bad idea. What is, perhaps, bad is the fact that there aren't more teams who have sporting sanctions taken against them. I know rather more about what is routinely "let go by" now than I did, say, 10 years ago when I first heard about the fact that SA had been excluded for 22 years. And there have been times, a decent number of them, when I've thought "where the hell is the consistency? If SA were kicked-out for that, I sure as don't get why there's barely a whisper here".
The unfortunate reality is, however, that some things are disproportionally reacted to. See the Iraq "war". British govornments have taken many, countless, worse decisions in the last, say, 40 years than participating in the action against Iraq. Yet the scale of protest there was some of the largest I've known. That doesn't mean those questioning the Iraq action were wrong to question it. But it does seem a little odd that they weren't complaining about a rather large number of other foreign policies.
As to was the isolation of SA implemented and kept because of the overall Government policy (Apartheid) or the lack of integration in cricket - well I don't know the answer. Unless someone made statements about it that I've never read, nor does anyone else - we can only guess. The point, though, is that the stand was being taken against the country in a
visible way (ie, we're not engaging you in sporting contests) because of the policy of the govornment. From what I know, it's unlikely that the end of Apartheid was actually hastened at all by the sporting exclusion. But the fact that it was an obvious statement of disapproval means I support it, even if those responsible should also have been directing their statements of disapproval elsewhere too.
