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Safety of England's players has to come first
MARTYN MOXON believes the safety of England's cricketers must remain uppermost in people's minds following last night's announcement the squad are returning home temporarily from their tour of India in the wake of the terrorist attacks that have devastated Mumbai.
Click here to read England's response to the terrorist attacks.
Yorkshire's director of professional cricket, who was part of England's 1984-85 tour to India which hung in the balance following the assassinations of President Indira Gandhi and Britain's Deputy High Commissioner Percy Norris, insisted it would be folly to take any risks surrounding the security of Kevin Pietersen and his players.
England's cricketers are due home tomorrow after the final two games of their one-day series were postponed following Wednesday night's attacks which left more than 100 people dead and around 300 injured.
They are due back in India for a two-Test series scheduled to start on Thursday week, but Hugh Morris, the managing director of England Cricket, has admitted no one can say with absolute certainty the Test matches will proceed in the current climate.
Moxon, who said the threat to the present England team was greater than the one faced by the 1984-85 tourists, told the Yorkshire Post: "The world has obviously moved on from the Eighties and, although the
1984-85 series eventually went ahead on the advice of the Test and County Cricket Board, the threat that cricketers face nowadays is potentially greater because of the escalation in terrorist activities.
"The worrying thing is that these gunmen have gone around specifically looking for English and American passport holders.
"It's a very difficult situation for us to judge from this distance, but the safety of the players must remain paramount and I don't think anyone will be taking any chances.
"The flip side is that the terrorists win in a way, but the last thing you want is for something terrible to happen to the England team."
Gunmen targeted a number of locations in Mumbai including the luxury Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, where Middlesex had been due to arrive 24 hours later for the Twenty20 Champions League.
That tournament has now been postponed, while England's Performance Squad – featuring Yorkshire's Michael Vaughan, Tim Bresnan and Adil Rashid – are also returning home from their base in Bangalore.
"It was only 24 hours from being a real nightmare in a cricketing sense, in addition to the real nightmare it already was for those people caught up in it all," added Moxon.
"That Middlesex had been due to arrive at the same hotel brings it home that any county team could suddenly have found itself caught up in that situation."
Moxon was only 22 years old on the 1984-85 tour and admitted he had been happy to stay in India following the Gandhi and Norris murders.
"It was my first tour, we arrived in the night and woke up the next morning to the news that Indira Gandhi had been assassinated – all hell had broken loose," recalled the former batsman.
"We were confined to the hotel, I think, for a week until they decided to fly us out to Colombo until things had calmed down a bit.
"I think we spent 10 days in Colombo before coming back to India; then, just before the first Test, we went to see Percy Norris in Bombay and the next morning he was shot on his way to the office.
"It's fair to say the senior players at that time wanted to come back, but the TCCB said we were going to stay and continue the tour.
"We had armed guards on the coach to and from the grounds, armed guards on the floors of our hotels, and security was pretty tight.
"We'd met Percy Norris and his family the night before and what happened to him was a huge shock to us all.
"I wasn't very vocal at the time because I was only a young lad and it was my first tour; in fact, I was quite comfortable with the idea of staying.
"Once we were told we were staying, it wasn't as though everyone was moaning that we shouldn't be there or anything like that, and the lads just got on with the job and managed to win the Test series and also the one-day series.
"I think the theory was that no one would attack a cricket team in India because they wouldn't get any sympathy, but I'm not sure that still stands in this day and age."
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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