Is match-fixing still alive?

The month of April always reminds me of the famous opening lines from TS Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’. Ever since most of the young students in my class in Chandigarh’s Panjab University grappled to understand the complexities of life, the poem for us became a window to decode a world burdened with its own traumatic history and hope for a better world to live in. We would recite these lines — “April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain” — as if it were our national anthem. The poem wasn’t easy to understand, like the life we were seeing unfold around us. Two and a half decades later, the month of April acquired an even more sinister meaning when in the year 2000, the world was made aware of the deep-rooted bookie-player nexus. The scandal rocked the cricket world when some of the top cricketers of the world were found to be fixing matches. Star players like the South African captain Hansie Cronje, India’s beloved Mohammed Azharuddin and many more were found compromised, betraying the very trust the fans had in the game. Since, as a reporter for The Pioneer newspaper at that time, I had a small role to play in un-peeling some of its complex layers, a Mumbai newspaper wanted me to revisit the scandal that had broken 25 years ago. As I took a bird’s-eye view of the very disquieting moments of that period, I was struck by the feeling of apprehension bordering almost on fear that is stalking a cricket fan whenever match-fixing is talked about. The uppermost question on their mind is: could it be happening even now? They themselves answer the doubt that has been raised: “Surely not, the players earn so much these days.” It is an answer that begs the question: how much is so much and what are the limits of human greed, and let me add, even its need? Cricket in India today is a commercial activity where, if a player makes it to the top or even qualifies to be a contender for a place in the Indian team, he ensures riches for himself. The Indian Premier League has multiplied a player’s earnings to eight-digit figures even for those who may never play for the country. Money is pouring in, but wait a minute. The situation was the same in the year 2013, and yet the Delhi Police registered a case against former Indian cricketer Sreesanth and a few others for accepting money from bookmakers for spot-fixing. The others involved with him were getting just the base price fixed (around Rs 10-20 lakh) for playing the league. The officer involved in that probe was Delhi’s Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar, who after retirement headed the Indian cricket board’s anti-corruption unit. For anyone who wants to know whether cricket has got rid of corruption or not and if “fixing” could still be a possibility, they should read the extremely disturbing account he wrote of his stint in the board. His book, ‘A Cop in Cricket’, is a shocking narration of how the various mini T-20 leagues, that almost all states in India hold, are a den of “give and take” with rampant corruption, be it in manipulating the odds or in selecting the team. He does not spare even the IPL, where he found some of the franchise teams’ talent-scouting unit compromised, with active connivance of a few former cricketers now masquerading as coaches. He makes it very clear in the book that he reported all these happenings to the top board officials but for reasons best known to them, no corrective measures were taken. Let us look at the riches cricket has to offer in India, which we presume makes a player immune to corruption, from another perspective. We make IPL look like an “employment guarantee scheme” by flashing rags-to-riches stories of some of the players who have made it to the big stage despite their parents struggling with extreme poverty. Great as it is, we don’t realise that the number of Indian players playing IPL is no more than 200. Let us expand these numbers by including those who play first class cricket. It should be around 1,000 but let us make it 1,500 and let us put the total number of those partaking of the riches to 2,000 in totality, including those playing for India, though here also, the gap in earnings between the top and the bottom is huge. In this vast land that India is, with a population of 1.4 billion, there are around more that 3,000 academies for aspiring cricketers who are dreaming to play for the country. That would roughly place the number at more than a few lakhs. For want of any concrete data, let us put the number of those training hard to fulfil their dreams to around 10-15 lakh. This number could be much more, certainly not less. The space at the top is limited, very limited, with 80 per cent among them getting squeezed out quickly, unable to stay for long among the very best. Those who taste the “good life” and want to make it into a lifestyle habit but fear getting blocked out due to lack of space are high in number. Human greed is immune to caste, colour, gender, race, religion and, significantly, even wealth. A scary thought this may be, but that is not the purpose of writing this. It always pays to be vigilant and to remember why “April is the cruellest month”. — The writer is the author of ‘Not Quite Cricket’ and ‘Not Just Cricket’

Comments