The day cricket became a political weapon

It is grimly ironic that yesterday I wrote a post suggesting that carpet pitches could be choking the life blood out of cricket, never thinking for one second that, the following day, a more shocking and tragic method would be found to kill cricketing tours, certainly to Pakistan for the forseeable future.

The gunmen who shot up the Sri Lankan cricket team bus this morning, killing six policemen and injuring seven players, have made sure of that. Which of course was almost certainly one of their aims. To undermine the confidence of the Pakistan authorities and to bring home the message that no one is safe in the most dramatic way



It's not the first time, of course, that sportsmen have been used as targets for an assassination and everyone remembers the tragic Munich Olympics in which so many Israeli athletes were killed. But there was a difference. The Israelis represented the sporting ambassadors of the very nation with which the gunmen bore a grudge. Although it's not yet clear who was responsible for the Lahore shootings they bore a similar stamp to the Mumbai killings some months earlier so we can probably assume an Islamic fundamentalist group was responsible and the Sri Lankan team were simply a high profile target with which to make a point. It is doubly sad that Sri Lanka stood in for India, who withdrew from the tour because of the Mumbai shootings, and this was their reward.

Pakistan is becoming a major problem. It is already being described as a 'failed state' for there seems to be no social and political cohesion within the country which can stop these extremists making it their home. What the next step is, politically, is anyone's guess. But the world of cricket has suffered a blow for which it was totally unprepared.