Innocent until proven guilty

Once Hansie Cronje phoned up Ali Bacher in the middle of the night back in April to admit to charges by the Indian police that he had taken bookmakers' money to fiddle matches, no cricketer, and no cricket match, would ever again be above suspicion.

It was known that Indian bookmakers had long since got their tentacles on the game, but the full extent was unclear.

There had been hundreds of unsubstantiated allegations of player involvement and just as many unconvincing denials, but it took the guilt of the seemingly upstanding, devoutly Christian South African captain to finally give the issue credence.

The exhaustive, official inquiries that have since followed - the report by Justice Mohammed Qayuum into Pakistani suspects, the King Commission in South Africa prompted by the Cronje affair and last week's report of India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) - have simply confirmed how widespread and insidious the corruption had become.

They have done the game a service by exposing the danger and stimulating the International Cricket Council (ICC) into taking it seriously - so seriously that they have set up an anti-corruption unit at the cost of US$7.6 million to tackle it.

But, in their anxiety to weed out the culprits, they have ignored the principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty and published accusations against named players without substantiated evidence.

Qayyum even found some guilty, fined and punished them, on the grounds, in Wasim Akram's case, that he was 'not above board' and 'cannot be said to be above suspicion'.

The CBI report has perpetuated the iniquity. It carries the uninvestigated, far less unsubstantiated, testimony of one prominent bookmaker, M.K.Gupta, implicating several prominent foreign players, in addition to his fellow Indians, in his shady business.

Only after the publication of the report will Sir Paul Condon, the former head of London's Metropolitan Police, and his ICC team of investigators be examining the cases.

For the reputation of the players concerned, it will be too late. Even if they are all eventually found innocent, the mud has already been thrown, has stuck and will be impossible to remove.

Even where it wasn't aimed in the first place, it found unsuspecting targets. According to the report, Gus Logie 'refused to cooperate in any manner with them (Gupta and his go-between, the Indian Test player Manoj Prabhakar)'. Yet Logie was distressed on Thursday to hear his name called on Caribbean television as one of two West Indians 'implicated in the report'.

The other, of course, was Brian Lara.

Here are the two references in the report to the former West Indies captain:

First: 'During that series (in Sri Lanka), Manoj Prabhakar also introduced Brian Lara and Ranatunga to MK. However, they were not paid any money.'

Then later: 'Towards the end of 1994, West Indies came to India and MK met Brian Lara again. Brian Lara offered to underperform in two One- Day matches and his information proved correct and MK made some money by betting on those matches. MK stated that he gave a sum of around US$40 000 to Brian Lara for his information.'

Lara 'offered'? How? What two matches? If he was so keen to 'offer' and earn 'a sum of around $40,000' and if MK cleaned up on the deal, why was no further contact between the two mentioned, even though there were three Tests in that series and even though Lara was back in India for the World Cup in 1996.

The CBI certainly didn't investigate the matter very thoroughly. And it is the same with the references to England's Alec Stewart, Sri Lanka's Arjuna Ranatunga and Aravinda deSilva and the other foreigners.

After Cronje, and now Mohammed Azharuddin, it would be foolish to lay your head on a block for any player. But surely accusations should not be published, and therefore given global exposure and credence, on the foggy memory of a proven crook.

One earlier charge against Lara, that he had bet on matches on the West Indies tour of South Africa in 1993 and made in an affadavit by an unnamed South African in June, was proven to be utterly false.

'Such is the mood of paranoia and distrust produced by the Hansie Cronje scandal that any high-profile international cricketer is now as much at risk as they are from individuals seeking to corrupt the game in the first place,' Lara wrote then.

It is a sentiment that still holds true. Cricketers, high-profile or otherwise, have the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, as those who are eventually will be.