ZCU embarks on a charm offensive

Peter Chingoka: ready to talk © Getty Images

The Zimbabwe Cricket Union has changed its PR tack in the face of adverse publicity which dogged some of its senior officials during the aborted ICC hearing in Harare. Whereas before it relied on bluster and the pro-government Daily Herald to get its message across, now it appears to be undertaking what almost amounts to a charm offensive.

The ZCU has been without a website for more than a year, and local journalists have hardly been wooed in the way that most other national boards try to get them "on message". But in the last few days the ZCU has announced that it will have a weekly column in a local paper and the Independent has carried an interview with Ozias Bvute in which he looked to get across the point that he was not the pariah many have made him out to be.

Until now the board has continued to maintain that there is a conspiracy against Zimbabwe cricket and has cut off any media source it sees as being against it or its senior officials. That's the way things are done in Zimbabwe, and the BBC has been banned in its entirety for daring to criticise the Mugabe government.

Wisden Cricinfo, which used to run the official ZCU website, has received the ZCU cold shoulder, and Peter Chingoka has told reporters that the ZCU will not longer have any contact with us. So questions go unanswered, and even offers to allow Chingoka to have his unedited say are ignored.

The Independent at the weekend cited examples of how it had recently posed questions to Chingoka about an incident of alleged intimidation only for him to go straight to the Herald - where a unchallenging reception was guaranteed - with his side of the story. But no longer.

The interview with Bvute was revealing for what he didn't say more than what he did. He was at pains to explain his side of recent events and the circumstances surrounding the breakdown of the relationship between the rebels and the board.

But in a separate article explaining how the board sought to get across itsw side of the dispute with the rebels, the Independent's Itai Dzamara couldn't help but suspect that all was not as it seemed. "We were frank on this one," he wrote. "It didn't sound right. Period! Both parties must have had skeletons in their cupboards. I mean the ZCU board and the white players. But certainly, in the chronology of events as related by the union, we smelt a rat!"

There were enough questions raised during last week's truncated hearing in Harare for even the board to realise that loudly and repeatedly maintaining that all was well in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary would no longer suffice. However, it has not yet grasped that merely smiling and giving newspapers your side of the story is not enough. But it's a start.