Sandip G writes: There is also an entire book — Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy — on the behind-the-doors manipulations before the India-Pakistan 2011 World Cup semi-final at Mohali. The final, some say, was also fishy.
He said he was a doctor but at heart a cricket-lover. Still, that didn’t fully explain his presence in Grenada’s St George’s, a one-street Caribbean island-town that was hosting an innocuous Sri Lanka-South Africa 2007 World Cup game. This shifty, middle-aged Delhi man was our nosy neighbor at the budget hotel which was home to many itinerant reporters at cricket’s big jamboree in the West Indies.
Most evenings he would invariably sneak up next to us. He started with eavesdropping on our cricket conversations but soon mustered the courage to join in. He was an unusual cricket follower. He didn’t have those usual star-struck fan queries. The doctor didn’t want to know how Tendulkar was in real life nor did he ask if Ganguly and Dravid got along. His questions were direct: Who is going to win tomorrow? Who will top-score? How is the pitch?
One evening the Dodgy Doctor, feeling empowered by our group’s general acceptance of him, asked if any of us knew the umpires. That’s when a seasoned pro among us stepped in. He asked the man wanting to be seen as a traveling fan if he could name a few players from South Africa and Sri Lanka, the teams he had followed to this back-of-beyond cricket destination. He gave a goofy smile and tried to change the topic. Who do you think is better, Lara or Tendulkar? Again, he played the fool. Others too joined in, pointed questions about his trip to Grenada were being asked now.
Nervous by the attention, he took leave and was never to be seen again. The rest of the evening was spent listening to the veterans narrating stories of the many ‘Doctors’ they had met during their cricket travels.
In the betting/fixing world, men like ‘Doctor’ were called the ‘runners’. They were the eyes and ears of the shady syndicate that ran illegal betting rings. Their job was to collect pitch information, keep an eye on the clouds sailing towards the stadium and generally gather every possible input that would help the odds-makers.
The enterprising and adventurous among the ‘runners’ would walk the extra mile. They would approach players, umpires or even reporters for the nuggets of inside information that would be gold dust for the bookies and punters. A player’s limping walk at the end of a training session might be some insignificant match-eve trivia for most but in the betting world, where cricket wasn’t just sport but a volatile stock on satta bazaar, it was a tip-off worth millions.
On that breezy Caribbean night, a few hard questions flew straight at the face. If the strings of the action on the pitch were being pulled by some unseen hands, what was the point of sitting through press conferences, exploring every blade of grass to write in-depth analysis? If the outcome was pre-decided, pre-match punditry was a sham, a virtual con-job.
Was one actually informed enough to be the glorified reliable messenger? What if you were actually one among the many unsuspecting Trumans inside this remotely-controlled sporting dome?
There are times in their careers when sportswriters face such existential questions. Like the other day when former Zimbabwe captain Brendan Taylor confessed of swimming with the sharks. He confessed to snorting cocaine with the fixers and taking money from them while insisting he didn’t cut a deal with them.
How times have changed, you thought. Remember the days when cricketers travelling to the subcontinent came with cans of baked beans and mineral water. Now within days of landing, they start rolling joints with strangers. You can have sympathy for the players representing bankrupt cricket boards, like the one in Zimbabwe, but do you really believe their story?
Cricket fans, it seems, have stopped caring. They have been so used to betrayals. Over the years, sting operations, confessions, match-fixing reports have nailed cricket’s Hall of Famers.
In 2000, a known South African fixer, Hamid Banjo Casim, told the King’s Commission, the panel probing the Hansie Cronje corruption case, that Kapil Dev was a friend. Cronje would confess that in 1996 it was Mohammad Azharuddin who had introduced him to a bookie.
In the mid-’90s, corruption in Pakistan cricket was brutally exposed by the Justice Qayyum report.
Cricket dutifully swept everything under the carpet. That ugly past has been conveniently forgotten, those charged solemnly forgiven. Even more recent events have had a shadow on them.
There is also an entire book — Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy — on the behind-the-doors manipulations before the India-Pakistan 2011 World Cup semi-final at Mohali. The final, some say, was also fishy. Sri Lanka’s ex-skipper Hashan Tillakaratne had asked an uncomfortable question about that game: Why were four Sri Lankan players changed for the final? Where facts start and fiction ends is difficult to say.
But in the wise words of A Few Good Men’s Colonel Jessup: Can we handle the truth?
Plus there’s the IPL, the world’s most popular T20 event that has a cryptic business model and mysterious ownership pattern. The league has proven cases of owners placing bets while sitting in the dugout, players more than willing to take orders from fixers, and unscrupulous administrators with dubious conflict of interest links.
Once out of curiosity, I went to The Indian Express archives to re-read a match report of a game that I had covered but was later found to be fixed. It was the India-South Africa ODI in 2000 at Vadodara. That was when South African skipper Hansie Cronje’s phone was being tapped by Delhi Police. Transcripts of conversation between Cronje and match-fixers were later made public. Subsequently, it was found that several Indian cricketers in that team too had links with bookies.
It was a tight game that South Africa lost on the penultimate ball. At one point Cronje seemed to be pulling off a miraculous win. Being sympathetic to the visiting team’s final-over heart-break, I had started the report like this: “Cricket is a funny game, they say. Ask Hansie Cronje and he would beg to differ.” In hindsight, the joke was on me. Such episodes don’t turn you into a cynic but they do make you skeptical. They teach you to look beyond the obvious and avoid being a fan-boy.
When stories of rampant cricket corruption hit headlines, reporters often get asked a difficult question. Is everything fixed? Clueless about the answer, I stick to a rehearsed routine. I make a poker face, take a pause, and give out a profound answer. “Not all,” I say. Hope, not conviction, is the basis of the answer.