KEVIN McCALLUM | No extra cover: SA not enough of a police state for Australians

The difference in the approaches of SA and Australia to containing the Covid-19 virus is simple, an Australian friend told me this week.

South Africans, through necessity and the situation they find themselves in, have accepted they have to live with the virus. Australians, on the other hand, do not want to live with it at all. They don’t just want the virus to be a safe social distance away. They want the virus to stay a world away, off their shores, preferably where more than 35,000 of their fellow Australians are still stranded trying to get back home.

The Australian government has slashed the number of travellers allowed in each week, a policy that will remain in place until February. Getting home to Australia isn’t cheap. If you can’t get onto one of the government-backed repatriation flights, some airlines charge more than R300,000 for a private trip home. That’s R300K one way. Then there is the 14-day quarantine period before you are allowed to travel anywhere in Australia, and those quarantine spots are monitored and regulated by the government.

It is, said my friend, like a “police state”. At the weekend, a security guard at a quarantine hotel in Perth tested positive. Western Australia shut the entire city of two million people down. Just before Christmas, there were positive tests around Sydney’s northern beaches. They shut down the city, stopped travel from Sydney to other states. It’s a police state, Bruce, but not as we know it.

Australian cricket has been arrogant, selfish and only interested in playing with England and India, and New Zealand if they had time.

Covid-19 shall not pass there, and if it does, then it will find itself in deep trouble. It’s an approach that resulted in just 990 deaths from the virus in Australia. It allows its citizens to watch live sport, see their mates and continue a form of normal life.

This approach informed and forced Cricket Australia to cancel the tour of SA. The risk, it said, is “unacceptable”. It felt there were areas in the tour plans that offered some small danger of infection and that was a small danger too far.

A source at Cricket Australia said there were issues in the negotiations for the tour, including deadlines for plans not being stuck to by Cricket SA, a lack of specific detail in some aspects, bus travel for one, and the biggest issue — how could they get back to Australia if one of their number tested positive?

Publicly and privately there are many at Cricket Australia who understand and sympathise with the fury from Cricket SA and South Africans. When the cancellation came, it hit hard. A kick to the stomach and a slash to the pride of South Africans.

Graeme Smith has a right to be angry. He has been working hard to make this happen. Much of the sympathy is directed at Smith. He commands a great deal of respect in Australia.

The anger has been wild, the backlash vicious, much of it no doubt fuelled by the behaviour of the Australian cricket team down the years. Australian cricket has been arrogant, selfish and only interested in playing with England and India, and New Zealand if they had time. They have only been interested in financial gain from big tours.

“Sandpaper” is being mentioned more than once. Michael Vaughan asked if Cricket Australia would call off a tour to India, which was fair, to be honest. Heck, Australia have been ready to go to Lord’s in June if they had made the World ICC Test Championship final.

It felt like an attack on Africans, a slap-down to say they could not trust the little country at the bottom of the continent to do the right thing. It felt like they were saying they could not trust Africans to get this right, you little third-world yokels.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Greg Baum, chief sports columnist, wondered how, then, would it be OK for 20 Australians to travel to play in the Indian Premier League. Was that a safer bubble? Was one bubble better than the other? Well, yes, if you are being paid what the IPL pays ...

Cricket Australia said it wanted the tour of SA to happen. The ICC World Test Championship has been the main goal for the team for two years. Without the trip to SA, the chance to play and win it is all but gone. They have lost that chance. SA has lost a much-needed series to bring in some cash and good news. No-one has won in this. All in cricket have lost.