Met with deafening silence
commitments to help fund the game in the underprivileged ethnic minorities of the country. As Taylor points out cricket is an expensive sport that needs funding in many Pasifika communities – so where is the help for these communities?
As ever it’s all wallpaper. The New Zealand Cricket board looks fine and dandy when it comes to inclusivity. The president and vice-president are women. Half the board are women and a quarter is Maori. But what are these people doing to tackle the ingrained racism in the sport and the lack of equal opportunity for kids?
Because Taylor makes it very clear that racism is a massive problem. He wrote: ‘‘A team-mate used to tell me, ‘‘You’re half a good guy, Ross, but which half is good? You don’t know what I’m referring to’. I was pretty sure I did.’’ Other team-mates made similar remarks but Taylor won’t name them because some are still part of the team and game. But he shouldn’t have to name them for his testimony to be acted on.
Mike Sandle, the Black Caps manager, offered Taylor’s wife help with their finances, because Sandle said a lot of Maori and Pasifika players struggled with money in his time with the Blues.
Even more damningly Taylor wrote: ‘‘When I came back into the team after the captaincy drama, I found myself sitting next to [coach] Mike Hesson in the Koru Lounge at Dunedin Airport.
He’d come straight from his house. ‘My cleaner’s Samoan,’ he said. ‘She’s a lovely lady, hardworking, very trustworthy’. All I could say was, ‘Oh, cool’.’’
Hesson comes across as a throwback to the time in 2003 when Martin Crowe wrote in his Wisden column that ‘‘Daryl Tuffey is a Maori and traditionally, not many Maori make good cricketers because they don’t have the patience or temperament to play through a whole day, leave alone over a test match.’’
In the wake of such historic racial insensitivity New Zealand Cricket should be all over Taylor’s comments, but instead it clearly hopes that if it does nothing, and say little, then it will all go away. But it won’t.
The power in New Zealand continues to be largely invested in white men. Look at New Zealand Rugby – Mark Robinson, Stewart Mitchell, Ian Foster, Sam Cane, Beauden Barrett. So how much do you think these people want to change the status quo?
New Zealand Rugby’s strategic plan is as barren as New Zealand Cricket’s. Look at those two documents and you will find nothing of substance. It is all right-on waffle, without any performance targets by which the boards can be held accountable.
Then compare those documents with the recently released strategic plan of Cricket Australia. It’s not perfect, but it’s night and day compared to New Zealand’s two pusillanimous offerings.
But here in New Zealand there is still this deafening silence. The significance of the title of Taylor’s book ‘Black & White’ seems to have passed cricket’s power brokers by. Perhaps if Taylor had called it ‘Black, Brown & White, a nation divided,’ someone might have noticed. But I doubt it.
Over 150 years ago a philosopher said: ‘‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of good over evil is for good men to do nothing.’’ And the good men and women of New Zealand Cricket are experts at doing nothing.