Book review: Cricket on the wrong foot

Just at the turn of the century, in the year 2000 to be precise, cricket was dealt a body blow from which it is yet to recover. Players of repute who were hero-worshipped in their country were caught on the wrong foot. Some of the names that came out left the fans shell-shocked and even those who didn’t follow the sport closely were stunned by the turn of events.

Sadly for cricket, those blows have been repeated every few years with clockwork regularity — there has been enough corruption and fixing in the world of cricket to demand a book on the subject. Shantanu Guha Ray’s book, Fixed! Cash and Corruption in Cricket, chronicles all the major incidents that have dented the image of the sport and those involved with it.

For those who don’t follow the sport closely, the book will enlighten in great detail about the mess that cricket is in. For those who are fond of cricket, it still offers insights and in-depth revelations about how the rot has spread.

It is not a straightforward affair; there are multiple layers to it and the powers that be are doing precious little to clean up the game. If anything, they are going that extra yard to ensure that status quo is maintained and corruption continues. The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s handling of the whole Gurunath Meiyappan saga — featuring the son-in-law of the then BCCI president N. Srinivasan — proves how serious the cricket body is about coming clean.

Ray, who specialises in investigative journalism, shines a bright light on everything that is murky in the world of cricket. The stakes are so high that Mr Srinivasan apparently hired a London-based detective agency to keep a tab on and tap the phones of those involved in probing the 2013 Indian Premier League scandal, including BCCI officials. The bill for this was a cool Rs 14 crore.

The author has interviewed several people quoted in the book, including those who form the principal cast of all that happens behind the scenes as far as betting and fixing are concerned. While the book updates your knowledge about various scandals, it also leaves you depressed about what the game has become: “I am almost convinced that the stable will never be clean. For too many have their fingers in the pie,” Ray says in the concluding line of the introduction. By the time you have finished the book, you couldn’t agree more.

In the first chapter, Fixed! highlights the inside world of bookies, describing in detail that fateful day in May 2013 when bookies were arrested in Delhi soon after S. Sreesanth and two other players of the now banned Rajasthan Royals were taken into police custody. While the arrests were made in the capital, the repercussions were felt in every nook and corner of the country and beyond — Pakistan, Dubai, Malaysia and even Singapore were involved in the hawala transactions. The government on its part has also done precious little to bring in legislation to effectively tackle the menace of match-fixing.

In England, for instance, Pakistani pacer Mohammad Amir was arrested in a spot-fixing scandal in 2010, convicted in 2011 and is already out after serving his five-year sentence. Meanwhile in India, in the match fixing scandal of 2000, the chargesheets were filed 13 years later in 2013, and the court hearings still haven’t reached anywhere.

To say that there are grey areas as far as the laws on betting are concerned is an understatement, as the book points out. The Public Gambling Act dates back to 1867 and it was only in 1996 that courts in Tamil Nadu declared gambling on horse racing as legal because it was a game of “skill”. Ray makes the point that if horse racing and Rummy are “games of skill”, why not cricket?

The chapters in the book delve into the minutiae of unfortunate and suspicious incidents linked to cricket over the years like the deaths of Bob Woolmer and Hansie Cronje. The India-born Woolmer was Pakistan’s coach during the 2007 World Cup, when he was found dead in his hotel room under mysterious circumstances after his team lost to the West Indies and then, inexplicably, to the minnows, Ireland. In what appears to be straight out of a thriller, the investigation took a different turn although the initial evidence suggested foul play. To this day, no one knows how Woolmer died.

Ray also focuses on the spot-fixing incident in England mentioned earlier and relatively lesser-known episodes like the fixing in the Bangladesh Premier League, which resulted in a ban on Mohammed Ashraful, the former Bangladesh captain who was fondly known as “Dhaka Tendulkar” after he made a debut with a bang at the age of 17. The author has interviewed Ashraful who gives us an insight into how cricketers get lured into the murky world of crime, eventually heading to a point of no return.

The whole IPL saga, including spot-fixing, Modi-gate, and the Shashi Tharoor controversy, gets in-depth coverage. There’s also a chapter dedicated to Jagmohan Dalmiya who, as president of the BCCI in his last tenure, was mentally so incoherent that he didn’t know which IPL team Sachin Tendulkar was mentoring. The Justice R.M Lodha committee rightly questioned the BCCI as to how it was functioning with a president who was so ill.

While Ray doesn’t hesitate to mention names in most cases, there is the odd reference where you have to read between the lines (and hope that you are reading correctly) — like the “finest cricketer of the 1980s and 1990s who was all set to become the skipper of the Indian team… who when called for questioning would sit with his legs on the table and demand chicken sandwiches and Darjeeling tea”.

The notable omission in the book is the Mohammad Azharuddin chronicle. The former Indian captain along with Ajay Sharma, Ajay Jadeja and Manoj Prabhakar, was banned by the BCCI in 2000. That episode doesn’t find a mention. It was the turning point in Indian cricket that lost many fans, never mind if new ones have replaced them since.

The epilogue of the book is even more damning where gloomier details emerge from the author’s inquiry. Cops from the Mumbai Police department also have their fingers in the pie. Shockingly, one of them allegedly made Rs 250 crore which was shared with his senior officers.

The Justice Mukul Mudgal and Justice R.M. Lodha committees appointed by the Supreme Court have offered a glimmer of hope, but how effective will the house cleaning be? Your guess is as good as mine. Only time will tell if the committees go the way of all other committees, but this well-written book serves as a reminder that cricket is no longer a gentleman’s game.