Why ignore Zimbabwe atrocities for cricket?

● Almost an hour before the first garishly pink ball was bowled under Paarl’s baking afternoon sun on Wednesday, Makhaya Ntini sent a plate of garlic bread clattering to the floor of the players’ dining-room.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. Here’s hoping it will reveal itself by the time we reach the last of these 500 words.

Ntini, South Africa’s yeoman fast bowler, is now part of Zimbabwe’s coaching staff. That’s why he was in Paarl: the Zimbabweans played a tour match there ahead of Tuesday’s test against South Africa at St George’s Park.

The visitors’ bus kicked up dust as it wheezed into the parking lot, the players spilled out with a listlessness probably caused by the heat but could have suggested they would have been more excited by a visit to a neighbouring wine farm, and anyone who has been around Ntini for five minutes knows he is incapable of not making noise.

All, then, appeared normal. If you didn’t know you wouldn’t have guessed that half the players in that dining-room wore the crest of a country ruled by the henchman of a dictator of 37 years, a henchman who mere days ago masterminded a military coup to remove the dictator from his path to the top of a broken society.

Should South African cricket be complicit in manufacturing the myth that all is well now that Emmerson Mnangagwa has replaced Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s despot-in-charge?

The question comes from someone who has covered at least 15-and-a-half cricket tours to Zimbabwe. I count the half as the time some of Bob’s other henchmen threw me out.

So I have done my bit to paint Mugabe’s regime in colours acceptable to the civilised world, or that part of it that likes to imagine itself as civilised. Guilty as charged and not at all comfortable with that.

That doesn’t disqualify the question. Neither does it quell the awkwardness of doubting the propriety of the presence in our midst of the most good-natured, modest, down to earth cricketers anywhere in the game.

To say that cricket is all they and their like-minded compatriots have to keep them something like sane is no exaggeration.

But when South Africa was a pariah state their teams were made unwelcome in other countries, and rightly so.

What’s the difference now? How is Zimbabwe not at least as bad a place to be if you aren’t connected to the right people as South Africa used to be if you were anything other than white?

There is no difference, except that there can be little question that Mugabe has made Zimbabwe an even worse place to live than apartheid South Africa.

And that sport has replaced politics with professionalism in its understanding of right and wrong.

The plate is shattered, but if the shards are pungent and buttery no one will care.