Fall guy Speed soldiers on — 06/02/2003

February 6, 2003 by neil manthorp

Very few South Africans will have formed a pleas­ant opin­ion of Mal­colm Speed in the last few weeks, let alone grown to admire or even like the man so allow me to assure you that he is a deeply sin­cere man and an indis­putably decent one.
He is a career admin­is­tra­tor and one so loy­al to his employ­ers that he will allow noth­ing to stand in the line of duty, and cer­tain­ly not per­son­al criticism.

Speed began his career in sports admin­is­tra­tion as a risky appoint­ment to the head of the Aus­tralian Bas­ket­ball League. For a sport that relies and glitz, glam and razzmatazz for its sur­vival, the grey-suit­ed, straight-faced Speed was an odd choice.

But you don’t need to wear leather trousers and an ear­ring to cre­ate a sexy prod­uct and Speed trans­formed the game before being snapped up by the Aus­tralian Crick­et Board. He’d bare­ly moved the pot plants into his Mel­bourne office before the ICC waved a fat cheque book at him and trans­ferred him to London.

Speed is a lawyer by train­ing and his sys­tem­at­ic approach to the most com­plex prob­lems always dis­plays the years of law study. I asked him last week what the ICC’s posi­tion was on the “like­ly casu­al­ties, pos­si­ble fatal­i­ties, that might result as a direct result of World Cup crick­et match­es being played in Harare.”

I knew it was a tough ques­tion because, per­son­al­ly, he is a sen­si­tive human being. But pro­fes­sion­al­ly he rep­re­sents 84 coun­tries with, as he keeps say­ing, “a wide cross sec­tion of races, reli­gions and cul­tur­al val­ues.” His per­son­al opin­ion was not only worth­less, it could have been dan­ger­ous. So his care­ful answer began: “That’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion which needs to be bro­ken down in to its com­po­nent parts.”

Basi­cal­ly Speed’s job was to say that casu­al­ties amongst demon­stra­tors were not the ICC’s busi­ness or prob­lem, but he had to say so in the most del­i­cate lan­guage pos­si­ble. It’s a bit like telling your neigh­bour’s chil­dren that you just ran over their dog…but that you did­n’t mean it.

Speed is walk­ing one of the most del­i­cate, polit­i­cal tight ropes that has ever been stretched across a sport. Eng­land and Aus­trali­a’s colo­nial, demean­ing and arro­gant admin­is­tra­tion of the game for half a cen­tu­ry infu­ri­at­ed the major­i­ty of the crick­et play­ing world and now they won­der why they even need two found­ing mem­bers of the ICC. Why not just go it alone, espe­cial­ly when you are India and gen­er­ate 75% of the rev­enue in the game?

Speed is try­ing to hold the frac­tured ship togeth­er. He is also try­ing to be a father, a hus­band, a spokesman, a peace mak­er — and he trav­els the equiv­a­lent of half way around the world every month.

Don’t let per­cep­tions deceive. Mal­colm Speed is a good man. Hard, some­times even bru­tal and most­ly uncom­pro­mis­ing, Speed is nei­ther uncar­ing nor unsym­pa­thet­ic. It’s just that he isn’t afraid to appear so when it’s need­ed. Who’d be an administrator