IPL spot-fixing 'tip of the iceberg'

The Hindu laments about India's current spot-fixing crisis and how, no matter what the BCCI has stated, the game has lost its credibility in India. This is a systemic problem that has been prevalent for some time, but has duly been ignored by the BCCI as they continue to wring as much money as possible from the game through outlets such as the IPL.

Cricket, or for that matter any other popular sport, has never been a stranger to such scandals. From the time the Chicago White Sox "threw" the American baseball championship in 1919, sport has been fair game for fixers. And in India, where betting on sport other than horse racing is illegal, almost everybody following cricket has been aware that outrageously large sums of money were changing hands each time a big game was played. This was particularly so in Twenty20 cricket, which lends itself easily to spot fixing.

DNA published a provocative cartoon lampooning the current spot-fixing cloud that has been hanging over the IPL since yesterday morning. The illustration depicts a painter who has changed the original batsman hitting a six image on the IPL logo, to one of a player desperately clutching at a bag of money. The inevitable fall as he reaches for the money bag is indicative of what happened to Sreesanth, Ajit Chandila and Ankeet Chavan.

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan, in his blog, Sidvee Blogs, highlights how the BCCI has been somewhat hypocritical, both in their stance and the actions they have taken to deal with individuals that have sullied the IPL in the past. He questions why the BCCI never formally handed stiffer punishments to the 'IPL five' of last year who were guilty of match fixing. Siddhartha also chronicles Sreesanth's rise into the Indian cricket team, and how he managed to come up from a cricketing backwater state like Kerala to become a leading fast bowler. His fall will dishearten those who took heart from how he rose from so little, to such prominence.

The league's integrity has taken a massive hit in the last four years - conflict of interest and arm-twisting over team ownership in 2010, fixing in 2012, fixing in 2013 - yet you wear multiple hats and refuse to send a clear message that you want to run a clean league? Doesn't it strike you that owning an IPL team and running the BCCI and sitting on the IPL governing council and heading the Tamil Nadu cricket association is clearly not the best way to "root out" corruption?