Caught Out - Shocking Revelations of Corruption in International Cricket. Brian Radford
referred to murder. They have reported the fear that some people have been involved. We have no doubt that certain individuals have received personal life threats.’
He was aware of Mukesh Gupta’s statement to the CBI that the Pakistan team had been close to a bookmaker called Hanif Cadbury who was killed in South Africa. Gupta had said that they were most probably ‘doing’ matches for him. Boldly sticking his neck out, Condon predicted: ‘If players are found guilty I am confident that all these countries will apply the appropriate penalty. No one involved in this inquiry is going to let the guilty go free, no matter how good a player he might be.’
Sadly this was totally contradicted by an ICC spokesman, who said: ‘Our brief is not to catch players but to stop the culture of corruption. As soon as our inquiries become criminal we will do our best to get the relevant police to take it on.’
The ICC has no powers of arrest, so everything is very much in the hands of the players and their cricket boards to decide what action is taken, which is why it is so easy for the guilty to have a good laugh and walk away scot-free.
Indeed, Prabhakar told me from Delhi: ‘We’ve been punished over here, so why are players not being punished by the cricket boards in other countries? Why are they being treated with kid gloves?’
Condon’s comments were so strange at times that I wondered whether he was the right man to be heading such a vast inquiry into a sport with which he had so little empathy or knowledge, and his qualification for the job as a former Metropolitan Police superintendent seemed seriously insufficient for the task in front him.
I imagine that the statement he made in May 2001 kept flashing back as the number of cricket corruption inquiries and allegations grew to a crisis level, and that Pakistan’s despicable match-fixing tour of England in summer 2010 caused him untold nightmares and embarrassment. Should anyone have forgotten, Condon’s fateful words were: ‘My ambition is to make it so tough for the few bad guys still left that the risks are not worth it.’
Players too terrified to bowl a deliberate no-ball, drop catches, give their wickets away in return for fat brown envelopes? Hardly! The truth is that cricket’s legion of crooks know too well that the ICC and the toothless independent cricket boards have as much bite as a mouse with dentures. Absolutely nothing will improve until cricket’s leaders forget about trying to preserve the ‘we are absolutely clean’ image and burn the brooms that brush the dirt under their carpets.
Silence is golden, as the old saying goes. Never could those words have been more joyfully said than in world cricket, in all languages from Bombay to Brisbane, Lahore to Lord’s, and Colombo to Cape Town. Test cricketers across the world have united in a conspiracy of silence, and key informants have refused to speak to the ICC investigators.
Condon encountered the frustration first-hand when he and a senior investigator flew half way round the world to Sri Lanka to interview two former Test heroes who had been named in the CBI report as players who had accepted money from an Indian bookmaker, but they declined to answer the questions he put to them.
Undaunted by their silence, Condon and his investigators battled on with little success, and he despairingly disclosed that only two countries had responded ‘satisfactorily’ to an ICC request for confidential knowledge and details of involvement in corrupt practices.
The trouble was that the proverbial wall of silence did not end with tongue-tied players, officials, managers and administrators. Not a single new name was mentioned in Condon’s 77-page tome. He referred only to those exposed in the CBI report, the King Commission in South Africa, and the Pakistan Cricket Board inquiry.
To be fair to Condon, he accepted that he faced a gigantic problem in getting people to speak to him and his team. He made the point that ‘although the Anti-corruption Unit has a vital role to play, its members do not have the powers given to judicial inquiries and police forces’.
India’s cricket leaders were fully satisfied that bookmaker Muktesh Gupta had told the truth. Indeed, they named, warned and banned players on the strength of his evidence. An official statement confirmed: ‘The CBI felt that their principal witness, M K Gupta, a bookmaker, had not been disproved in respect of any allegations that he had made, and they did not think he was lying.’
Corrupt cricketers, illegal bookmakers and crooked gamblers are a curse to the game at every level, and it is critical that the ICC does not help them tarnish the sport even more by staying mute when drastic action is needed.
It is imperative that the ICC tears off its gag and names and shames the guilty individuals, and it is just as important that every individual governing body provides maximum support to rid the sport of the insidious silence that is threatening to undermine all those genuine efforts that are being made to clean up the sport.
HOW ENGLAND SWEETLY LICKED THE AUSSIES!
It seemed that everyone in Britain was suddenly being gripped by Ashes fever in the summer of 2005 as England tried every imaginable trick – legitimate and otherwise – to lick the mighty Australians in a cricket contest that had the country practically grinding to a standstill.
Even those who knew nothing about the game, and the ones who hated it, were magically transformed into trembling fanatics desperate to follow every ball that was bowled. Some people confessed that the tension often became too much for them, and that they hid behind settees and under tables, unable to suffer the suspense of looking at their television sets. It really was that riveting.
Australia entered the series as holders of the prestigious little urn that theoretically contained those specks of dust that matter so much to players and supporters of both nations. It was a powerful Australian squad that was top of the world ratings. Their brilliant pace bowler Glenn McGrath, along with many, many others, were predicting a possible 5-0 whitewash.
In a series that was subsequently hailed as the ‘most thrilling ever’, there were countless shocks and surprises – and, sadly, it is now officially known that there was quite a bit of cheating and chicanery, too.
England won the series 2-1, with the outcome decided on the very last day amid immense drama and excitement. It was a sweet success in more ways than one. Some fanatics were trumpeting that England had actually licked the Aussies. And how right they were. In fact they had literally licked them! Reverse swing had played a major part, with England’s pace bowlers constantly bamboozling Australia’s strong batting line-up. Andrew Flintoff, Simon Jones, Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard all generated enormous swing, and were unplayable at times.
Towards the end of this truly unforgettable series I was telephoned by a reliable England insider and assured that there was a lot more to this extraordinary reverse swing than just physical skill or playing conditions. ‘It’s all down to Murray Mints!’ was the astonishing claim. ‘Someone is sucking Murray Mints to get sugar into his saliva, and then when he licks the ball he gets more shine on it, and this helps it to swing all over the place…’
To be honest, I was shocked and disappointed. Other cricket nations had been pilloried for ball-tampering – one country in particular – and now I was being told with absolute certainty that England had succumbed to doing the same. Winning at all costs was universal, it seemed, and I resented it. I thought of all those millions of ecstatic British supporters, including thousands new to Test match cricket, who genuinely believed that what they were watching was absolute skill and nothing more.
The name of England’s marathon Murray Mint chewer was also disclosed to me, and I found it hard to believe that he was involved, especially as he was someone I had admired as an exceptionally gifted batsman.
Though working as an investigative reporter for a Sunday tabloid at the time, I resisted the temptation to tip off my sports editor and reveal to him and the nation that England’s powerful left-hand opener –