The Surfer

India's mismanagement is bad for cricket elsewhere. The financial dominance of India has given its rulers a de facto veto on how the game is run globally. But India takes no responsibility for the Indian bookies corrupting cricket. The cricket board appears to view the collaborative culture of international cricket mainly as a threat to its interests.

This is not a league. This is not even a random collection of franchises (some of which come and go, and some which come, go, come and go again) playing a sport. There are no real laws, codes or regulations to adhere to. This is an ad-hoc, money-making enterprise, one in which the power brokers are not bound together by anything other than the desire to perpetuate their status quo. This is a cabal, a cartel of the already wealthy getting wealthier and making sure they protect themselves in doing so. Cricket just happens to be a means.

Some controversy hits the IPL every year. But this controversy is by far the most crippling. Because this has put the credibility of the very league in doubt. It has brought criticism and apprehension to the minds of all kinds of stakeholders, from politicians, who want to nationalise the BCCI or ban the IPL, to Pepsi, which may want out as its lead sponsor. This time, the BCCI cannot blame a mere individual and hang him. Nor can it rely on the old cynical and lazy notion that cash will solve all problems. It has to clean up not just the IPL, but itself, make a promise of transparency and offer itself voluntarily to some kind of an impartial, outside oversight, if not RTI

'I'd be lying if I said it didn't,'' he says. ''I think I'm a lot more comfortable now with where cricket is at. Sometimes you can get caught in the bubble and think international cricket is the be-all and end-all. But with what happened at home, it put things in perspective. And I'm very comfortable now with where my game is at and where my cricket is at.

As a franchise owner, and as someone closely related to an individual now under the scanner for deals and dalliances with dubious bookmakers, Srinivasan needs to step down from the helm of the BCCI. Shukla, under whose watch the league faces its biggest crisis of credibility, has also lost the moral right to stride to the podium to hand out the silverware to winners on match days. By all accounts, the parliamentarian and minister has squarely put himself in the way of charges of taking his eyes off the ball and conflict of interest allegations.

The reason bookies might offer such odds--1:1 for the coin, 5:1 for the dice--is that they know their probabilities as well as you do, and naturally they don't want to lose money. In fact, they will likely tweak the odds they offer just enough so they actually make money. That is, after all, why they do what they do. So if you find a bookie offering quite different odds than you expect, it's likely he knows something you don't.

As Sunil Gavaskar sagely said on television after the Sreesanth story broke, there should be no rush to judgment. These are wise words: if the past and precedent (and the ability of the Indian police to secure a conviction) are a guide, it isn't just possible, it is likely that Sunnybhai might find himself some years from now sharing a commentary box with a shiny, new, exonerated Sreesanth. The IPL is a golden Ganga in spate; it gilds everything that it touches.

In that moment, either he would have forgotten, or cavalierly ignored, the fact that he was in effect on broadcast. Marvelling once at an especially profane radio commentator who somehow never slipped up on air, he explained that the microphone acted on him as the presence of his mother would. Social media, unfortunately, seems to be the province of orphans.

As the allegations against Sreesanth have shown, a taint on one format will not necessarily leave the rest of cricket unaffected. A beginning needs to be made of finding ways to collectively own the T20 format, and to do so in a manner that recognises that the IPL is not any old domestic league. In its composition and in the priority that the best cricketers anywhere in the world give it (even if it is for purely monetary reasons), it is not.

"Cricket journalists still remain remarkably innocent of the details of spot-fixing, spread betting and how online betting sites -- perfectly legitimate ones -- allow for very dynamic odds, entry and exit of the punter in real time and at strategic moments, and the analogue of what the stock market would call futures trading.