Is there a suggestion of a ‘Holier than thou’ attitude to be seen in Graeme Swann’s belief that cricket cheat Mohammad Amir’s return to the hallowed turf of Lord’s sickens him? “This is a man who crushed the morality of the game. And yet he is being allowed back to play at the home of cricket,” Swann says.
Perhaps, there is place for the point of view that the disgraced Pakistan fast bowler has not paid the consequences for his part in the corruption scandal involving spot-fixing. But not to accept the ruling of law and move on with the game is to be somewhat hoity-toity.
Cricket lost its morality long ago, perhaps soon after its birth when it became the most popular medium for wagers. The game that seemed to become a metaphor for fair play came as it evolved. To believe cricket could ever survive in its so-called innocent form was always a pipedream. In the most modern era, the game was brought down from its moral high horse in a series in India in which a gentleman named Bagri was betting on the outcome of the toss and was influential enough to fix the outcome through certain players.
Once in, that kind of corruption of matches at the highest level was bound to eat away at the vitals. No one believes the influence of the corrosive illegal betting market is any less now, even after all the hullaballoo over the top levels of Team India having come under the influence of high rollers and bookies from the world of gambling. The IPL probably made matters considerably worse with many a nouveau multimillionaire of the game still indulging in questionable match and spot-fixing practices. The sheer shock value of rich sportsmen indulging in something as low as fixing should have alerted the authorities to doing something about it. Also, this was not Indian cricket’s first great cricketing scandal.
The ostrich in the sand act was, however, the perfect smokescreen for the BCCI bigwigs. They were led by precedent to believe in fixing outcomes of probes rather than facing up squarely to the problems of the sport having been so thoroughly corrupted. They never believed they could corral in the players who, by the sheer weight of their money power and glamour, seemed to have become bigger than the game. It took another blowout from within the game for the betting and fixing scandals of the IPL to become so big that there was no hiding the ‘pumpkin’ in the rice as the saying goes.
The full blown scandal finally brought things to such a head that a defiant BCCI was taken to task by Supreme Court appointed panels, the first of which, headed by Justice Mukund Mudgal, went into the heart of the scandal of players spot-fixing and a team principal betting from the dugout as it were. It took exceptional action on a leading cricketer, who was a member of the T20 worlds of 2007 and the 2011 World Cup winning teams, to ring out a warning as the extent of the involvement of players in betting rackets had just come out in the open. As someone explained once, “It takes a jockey to pull a horse.” And the involvement of the few players who were sanctioned and banned was only the tip of the iceberg.
The BCCI’s stand that the players were innocent and that all the evil flowed from the bookies of the betting market stood exposed. Compared to all this, the foolish thing that Amir did was almost a piffle although he paid a far higher price in being jailed in a foreign land. As an adult, he is responsible for any mistake he committed, as Swann points out. But then it can be said that he was more unfortunate than many fellow cricketers who had dabbled in worse things and got away with it.
At the height of the first scandal, the Aussies were those with the worst ‘holier than thou’ attitude and yet the cricket board did very little about the involvement of Shane Warne and Mark Waugh except to fine them a token sum, which punishment was later used to protect them from double jeopardy.
As I have said before, only one or two cricketers had such integrity as to be way above the temptations of the dark forces. Many of those involved in the first great betting scandal of the ‘90s had reason to be ashamed of the things they did in cohorts with betting contacts. The most curious thing about it is the links remained for so long even after one captain and his Man Friday in these matters were banned. So, it’s best that a reformed Amir be allowed to play on provided he stays clean. If everyone had been subjected to the same kind of investigations and laws under which Amir was quartered and hung, British jails may have been full of cricketing legends.
