It was born as an African sportfest, a mammoth 54-match tournament across three nations to celebrate cricket -- the game Britain once took to its colonies and now finds as ornery as its one-time empire turned out to be.
Then politics got in the way.
As Zimbabwe played Namibia in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, on Monday, two top Zimbabwean players -- one black, one white -- wore black arm-bands over their red and green uniforms to protest President Robert Mugabe's authoritarian rule. "In doing so, we are mourning the death of democracy in our beloved Zimbabwe," Andrew Flower and Henry Olonga said in a statement.
That was on the second day of competition in a series of one-day international cricket matches to be played mainly in South Africa, but also other former British colonies, Kenya and Zimbabwe.
Tuesday, the English cricket squad, which had dithered for weeks over whether to brave the political and security risks of playing in Harare, said it would not go to Zimbabwe for its first scheduled cricket World Cup game today. The decision amounted to a boycott unprecedented in cricket.
The English team cited concerns about the safety of spectators at the game to justify its reluctance to go to Zimbabwe. Worries about the implications of seeming to support Mugabe, who had been much criticized over the past two years in Britain for seizing white-owned farms and presiding over economic decline, appeared to have played a part in the move.
Critics of the English team's behavior worried that it could provoke a counterboycott by Zimbabwe and South Africa, whose teams are to play in England next year.
Nasser Hussain, the English captain, said debate over whether to go to Zimbabwe or not was so intense that some players broke into tears.
The English cricketers say they received death threats and other warnings about their safety.
One anonymous letter was reported to have said they would return home "in coffins" if they played in Zimbabwe.
In some ways, the dispute has made cricket hostage to the messy and mutually exclusive visions of the British government, which says it pursues a foreign policy based on ethical considerations, and of Mugabe, who taunts Britain as a former colonialist power out to derail his country's 1980 independence.
Britain has supported various European Union and Commonwealth sanctions against Zimbabwe and has been critical of Mugabe's seizure of white-owned farms and scorn for democracy in presidential elections last year that are widely seen as rigged.
For months, the British government declined to pronounce on the cricket game in Zimbabwe. In December, it announced that it would prefer the players not to go to Harare but said it would not help the team bear any financial burden resulting from staying away.
By contrast, the two Zimbabwean players, Flower and Olonga, have taken an uncompromising political stance.
"We cannot in good conscience take to the field and ignore the fact that millions of our compatriots are starving, unemployed and oppressed," they said in their statement.
"We are aware that hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans may even die in the coming months through a combination of starvation, poverty and AIDS. We are aware that many people have been unjustly imprisoned and tortured simply for expressing their opinions about what is happening in the country."
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