Friday, August 14, 2009

Second Chance

Imagine you are working in front of a bunch of your customers. One of your customers heckles you and you get angry. Very angry. So angry that you throw a very hard 5.5 oz. round object in his direction with all your might. But fortunately for your heckler and the other customers around him, it hits no one. You are incensed. So you pick up a metal spike, which is lying conveniently close to you, and try to use it as your next missile. But thankfully, you get taken down by people who think you have gone too far. You are handed a punishment, but life goes on.

A couple of months later, you are not considered for a new project by your biased employer, when you should really have been an automatic shoo-in for the project. So you whip yourself up into a rage again, get into your car, go to the office and burn the bloody office down. That will show your employers not to mess with you.

In a normally functioning world, it would be safe to say that the chances of your ex-employers hiring you back again would be as much as the Taliban hosting a Victoria's Secret fashion show in Kandahar. But if your name is Mark Vermuelen and your employer is the Zimbabwe Cricket Board, you will find yourself opening the batting for Zimbabwe in around 3 years after you destroyed the Zimbabwe Cricket Board's Headquarters and their National Academy building.

And just in case if you are thinking, how did he get away from 25 years of prison for arson? By pleading not guilty due to mental illness. To be precise, "partial complex epilepsy and impulsive behaviour disorder", brought on as a result of having his skull fractured by a cricket ball, during a match against India.

This is really not an attempt to judge the seriousness of his injury or judge how much that had to play a part in his actions thereafter. I do sympathise with him. I mean poor Vermuelen was so unlucky that he got hit by a cricket ball on the same part of his skull twice in a year, even after wearing a helmet. That is more than enough for brain damage. Granted he has had anger management issues even before the injury (uprooting the stumps and locking himself in the dressing room because he was given out), but then maybe the injury just exacerbated the problem. From what I have read about him, apart from his outbursts, he seems like a fairly nice guy.

But what amazes me is that the Zimbabwe Cricket Board hired him back. Especially with the kind of history the Board has. This is a board run by the cronies of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe. A man whom history will definitely hold responsible for reducing Zimbabwe to what it is today. When the life expectancy of a people drops from 60-something to 30-something over a period of just a few years, you know that something is terribly wrong in the country. On one hand, you have a Cricket Board, which is just an extension of the policies of Mugabe's government and on the other hand, you have Vermuelen, who is as stereotypically a white Zimbabwean as they come. Tall, blond and from an affluent family. And he has definitely not endeared himself to the board by his actions. The very fact that somebody like him can get back into the team after what he has done baffles me. Whether it is a sign of desperation on part of the Board or whether it is change in policies, one will never know.

But good for him. I am glad atleast something is going right for him. I hope for his sake and for the sake of others, that his psychological issues are really over. Good luck Vermuelen and more importantly, good luck Zimbabwe.

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