India eats, breathes and sleeps cricket, and the game's dark side comes with the territory. Ramakrishna Upadhya writes about Ed Hawkins's latest that states the obvious vices surrounding the sport.
Although cricket has a history spanning over 500 years, for the better part of its early phase, it was a white man's game, mainly played between England and Australia. Gradually, some of the countries ruled by the British Empire, particularly the Indian subcontinent, the West Indies and South Africa were sucked into the game, giving it an 'international' character.
The International Cricket Council's persistent efforts over the decades to expand the game globally has met with limited success, though the enthusiasm and passion displayed by cricket lovers in the subcontinent, which is home to nearly one-third of the world's population, has spurred its growth phenomenally, bringing in its wake, almost inevitably, the canker of corruption in the form of gambling, match-fixing, spot-fixing and so on.
India's interest in the game got a shot in the arm with Kapil Dev-led team winning the 1983 World Cup in England. The economic liberalisation of 1990s and the consequent financial boom, followed by the spread of consumerism and the reach of television, brought the corporate world closer to cricket, making the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) extremely rich, almost overnight. The BCCI's recent domination of the game culminated in the creation of $2 billion IPL cricket league in 2008, attracting cricketers from all over the world with hefty pay packets.
The ICC seethed with anger and jealousy, as its influence and power crumbled,
but there was nothing it could do about it.
Cricket has a long and unedifying association with gambling, going back to the English County games in the 18th century. The game's nature and structure is such that it lends itself to multiple levels of betting, and it is a gambler's delight. Though a team sport, the individual players can wield enormous influence on how the game progresses, and a handful of them getting together can even manipulate the result very subtly, without being detected.
With the flow of big money into the game came in the gamblers and bookies in hordes, who saw great opportunities to make crores of rupees at the bat of an eyelid. They befriended some of the players and administrators who became willing pawns in their hands for manipulating some parts, or whole matches, in return of handsome bribes.
When former India captain Mohammed Azharuddin and former South Africa captain Hansie Cronje and some of their co-players were 'caught' in major scandals, it became clear that the cancer had spread right to the top, threatening the credibility of the game itself.
Ed Hawkins, an accomplished sports journalist who has been tracking the betting disease in cricket for a long time, has attempted to uncover the shady world of match fixing in his book Bookie, Gambler, Fixer Spy - A Journey Through the Heart of Cricket's Underworld. The author has zeroed in on India for his 'research' and through the help of two mid-level bookies, Vinay and Parthiv, carries the readers through the Byzantine lanes of match fixing, spot fixing and 'brackets', which involve gambling in hundreds of crores of rupees with the mafias playing a major role.
Though the 232-page book makes an interesting read, Hawkins adds nothing new that is not already known to cricket buffs. His attempt to give a 'sensational' touch to his narration by claiming to uncover how the India-Pakistan World Cup semi-final match at Mohali in 2011 was 'fixed' completely falls flat, as he fails to offer any corroborative evidence. He follows the trail of a 'script' for the alleged 'fix' given by a bookie weeks in advance, minutely looking at the Pakistan batting in that match, analysing in particular how Misbah-ul-Haq and Younis Khan batted 'slowly' in crucial overs, but unwittingly concludes, "One cannot consider those (figures) unusually high or evidence of a player deliberately underperforming." (Page 200).
Hawkins also tries to cast a shadow of massive corruption in the IPL, pointing out how the BCCI, in the first two years of the tournament, had failed to involve the Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (ACSU) of the ICC to monitor the games. Here again, he comes up with nothing concrete and peddles the usual speculations and suspicions. Though many international cricketers, including that of Australia, England and South Africa, have been named and shamed for their alleged involvement in betting or match fixing, the only instance of conviction so far is that of three Pakistani cricketers who were nailed in a sting operation by The News of the World.
As Lalit Modi, the principal brain behind IPL, points out in one of the interviews in the book, top international players now earn so much from the game that they have priced themselves out of any shady bookie's reach, nor do they want to risk their careers when their performances are constantly under the glare of the investigators, the media and the general public.
But it is fair to assume that an odd match fixing or part-fixing and an enormous amount of betting with or without the involvement of players will continue to happen as 'the glorious uncertainties of the game' offer a perfect platform for basic human instincts of speculation, gambling and making a quick buck sitting and watching an exciting match on television, or following it ball-by-ball on the Internet. Gambling is everyone's birthright, and so it shall be!
Although cricket has a history spanning over 500 years, for the better part of its early phase, it was a white man's game, mainly played between England and Australia. Gradually, some of the countries ruled by the British Empire, particularly the Indian subcontinent, the West Indies and South Africa were sucked into the game, giving it an 'international' character.
The International Cricket Council's persistent efforts over the decades to expand the game globally has met with limited success, though the enthusiasm and passion displayed by cricket lovers in the subcontinent, which is home to nearly one-third of the world's population, has spurred its growth phenomenally, bringing in its wake, almost inevitably, the canker of corruption in the form of gambling, match-fixing, spot-fixing and so on.
India's interest in the game got a shot in the arm with Kapil Dev-led team winning the 1983 World Cup in England. The economic liberalisation of 1990s and the consequent financial boom, followed by the spread of consumerism and the reach of television, brought the corporate world closer to cricket, making the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) extremely rich, almost overnight. The BCCI's recent domination of the game culminated in the creation of $2 billion IPL cricket league in 2008, attracting cricketers from all over the world with hefty pay packets.
The ICC seethed with anger and jealousy, as its influence and power crumbled,
but there was nothing it could do about it.
Cricket has a long and unedifying association with gambling, going back to the English County games in the 18th century. The game's nature and structure is such that it lends itself to multiple levels of betting, and it is a gambler's delight. Though a team sport, the individual players can wield enormous influence on how the game progresses, and a handful of them getting together can even manipulate the result very subtly, without being detected.
With the flow of big money into the game came in the gamblers and bookies in hordes, who saw great opportunities to make crores of rupees at the bat of an eyelid. They befriended some of the players and administrators who became willing pawns in their hands for manipulating some parts, or whole matches, in return of handsome bribes.
When former India captain Mohammed Azharuddin and former South Africa captain Hansie Cronje and some of their co-players were 'caught' in major scandals, it became clear that the cancer had spread right to the top, threatening the credibility of the game itself.
Ed Hawkins, an accomplished sports journalist who has been tracking the betting disease in cricket for a long time, has attempted to uncover the shady world of match fixing in his book Bookie, Gambler, Fixer Spy - A Journey Through the Heart of Cricket's Underworld. The author has zeroed in on India for his 'research' and through the help of two mid-level bookies, Vinay and Parthiv, carries the readers through the Byzantine lanes of match fixing, spot fixing and 'brackets', which involve gambling in hundreds of crores of rupees with the mafias playing a major role.
Though the 232-page book makes an interesting read, Hawkins adds nothing new that is not already known to cricket buffs. His attempt to give a 'sensational' touch to his narration by claiming to uncover how the India-Pakistan World Cup semi-final match at Mohali in 2011 was 'fixed' completely falls flat, as he fails to offer any corroborative evidence. He follows the trail of a 'script' for the alleged 'fix' given by a bookie weeks in advance, minutely looking at the Pakistan batting in that match, analysing in particular how Misbah-ul-Haq and Younis Khan batted 'slowly' in crucial overs, but unwittingly concludes, "One cannot consider those (figures) unusually high or evidence of a player deliberately underperforming." (Page 200).
Hawkins also tries to cast a shadow of massive corruption in the IPL, pointing out how the BCCI, in the first two years of the tournament, had failed to involve the Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (ACSU) of the ICC to monitor the games. Here again, he comes up with nothing concrete and peddles the usual speculations and suspicions. Though many international cricketers, including that of Australia, England and South Africa, have been named and shamed for their alleged involvement in betting or match fixing, the only instance of conviction so far is that of three Pakistani cricketers who were nailed in a sting operation by The News of the World.
As Lalit Modi, the principal brain behind IPL, points out in one of the interviews in the book, top international players now earn so much from the game that they have priced themselves out of any shady bookie's reach, nor do they want to risk their careers when their performances are constantly under the glare of the investigators, the media and the general public.
But it is fair to assume that an odd match fixing or part-fixing and an enormous amount of betting with or without the involvement of players will continue to happen as 'the glorious uncertainties of the game' offer a perfect platform for basic human instincts of speculation, gambling and making a quick buck sitting and watching an exciting match on television, or following it ball-by-ball on the Internet. Gambling is everyone's birthright, and so it shall be!