Cricket finds a potent voice

Every year around this time, the Spirit of Cricket lecture is delivered at Lord's. It was inaugurated in 2001 in memory of Lord Cowdrey of Tonbridge, a former president of the MCC, but better known as a captain of England who once came out to bat with a broken arm against the feared West Indies fast bowlers Wes Hall and Charlie Griffiths.

If you thought the lecture was another tedious event at which old farts got a chance to drone on about how much better the game was in their day, you could not be more mistaken. Archbishop Desmond Tutu delivered an entertaining one in 2008, full of his sparkling wit and sharp observations.

There was a typical piece of self-deprecating Tutu humour. Having sent a copy of his address to the gentlemen of the MCC, he was told it was too short.

He was delighted to expand. "Can you imagine a preacher missing out on . a captive audience?" he responded. "You are in trouble . I have a few additions."

He went on to drop a few names, as is his wont, and told the story of an inveterate name-dropper called John. "Why you are so fond of name-dropping?" he said the friend had asked John, who replied: "Oh, that's strange. Yesterday when I was in Buckingham Palace the Queen asked me the same question."

From that point, the Tutu lecture was a real treat.

Tutu recalled how cricket had won him over, as it did many others, through the BBC commentaries of John Arlott. As a schoolboy he had tuned in for news of the Test series against England in 1947 which Dudley Nourse's Springboks lost 3-0.

Tutu had been recovering from TB in hospital where another patient, a teacher, had introduced him to Arlott's husky tones. He didn't say where his sympathies lay at the time, but as a kid living the hardscrabble apartheid life in Sophiatown it would have been hard to identify with the all-white baasskap Boks in England.

He went on to pay tribute to people like his dear friend David Sheppard, the late Bishop of Liverpool who turned down an invitation to lead the MCC on a tour to South Africa, and who drove the sports boycott that helped undermine apartheid, perhaps even more than any armed struggle.

"We know that politics and sport have an important relationship," he continued. "We indicated that the sports boycott played a crucial part in our liberation, and now sport is playing a pivotal part in helping to build South Africa."

He received a standing ovation at Lord's that night, much like Kumar Sangakkara did last week when he delivered the 2011 lecture.

At a time when we have come to expect vacuous statements from our corporate sports stars, Sangakkara was eloquent and articulate. "There was sound and fury all right," said Michael Atherton, "but plenty of substance, too." Peter Roebuck, hardly a voice of hyperbole, described it as the most important speech in cricket history.

Sangakkara used his chance to reveal the horror of being under fire when the Sri Lankan team's bus was attacked by gunmen two years ago and to expose the "corruption and wanton waste" by a cricket administration of "partisan cronies" in his homeland.

Roebuck, who described Sri Lankan cricket as being run by a "mixture of government lackeys and bookmaking families", said Sangakkara's speech was "nothing less than a challenge to cricket to set higher standards for itself, to reject jealousy, pettiness and greed".

Our own Cricket SA has, fortunately, not descended to levels of Sri Lankan, Zimbabwean or Pakistani cricket where the turmoil has affected their teams. If it does, let's hope we can find a spokesman as erudite - and fearless - as Sangakkara. I fear we might hope in vain.