Sport In Crisis: Cricket (6 February 1999)

6 February 1999

Sport In Crisis: Cricket

By Mihir Bose

CRICKET's annus horribilis was always considered to be 1932, the year of the Bodyline series which nearly led to a rupture of relations between England and Australia.

But events of the last 12 months have completely dwarfed those of 1932. Both domestically and internationally, cricket has gone from crisis to crisis. A game once considered the gentleman's sport, where fair play always ruled, is now seen as rudderless, with administrators who cannot define the role of women and are unable even to police players on the field; all this when there is convincing evidence that some parts of the game are in hock to bookmakers.

Such a view found an international focus on Dec 8 when it was revealed that two Australian players had been involved with an Indian bookie and fined by the Australian Cricket Board.

Until then it had been assumed that the ongoing four-year-old bribery saga, which had begun in the winter of 1994 when three Australian cricketers, Tim May, Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, alleged that the then Pakistan captain, Salim Malik, had offered them £130,000 to throw a Test match, was a subcontinental speciality.

Now it was revealed that during Australia's tour of Sri Lanka in September 1994, Waugh and Warne had provided information about the weather and the state of the pitch to an Indian bookie called John. Warne was paid around £2,500 and Waugh around £3,000. The Australian board had fined Waugh £5,000 and Warne £4,000.

What made the whole story worse was the discovery that the Australian board had covered it up for four years. What made it potentially sinister was that although they informed the International Cricket Council, cricket's governing body, they were told to keep it a secret.

By the time the Australians told them, the ICC were well aware of the Pakistan investigations into bribery, but David Richards, chief executive of the ICC, and Clyde Walcott, then chairman, felt the world body could do nothing.

Since the revelations the ICC have made great efforts to demonstrate that they now have the sort of policing powers other international bodies have. But when the ICC announced in January that a three-man commission was to be set up with powers to investigate bribery allegations, they did not reveal either the names of the commissioners nor their exact powers of investigation and right to impose punishments.

This sense of international impotence was embarrassingly exposed just two weeks later during a one-day international between England and Sri Lanka in Perth, when the off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan was called for throwing by the Australian umpire Ross Emerson.

The reaction of the Sri Lankan captain, Arjuna Ranatunga, was extraordinary. He took his players off the field, then after consultation brought them back, but ordered Emerson to stand where he was told with the sort of finger wagging and body language to which a schoolmaster might subject an errant boy.

The match was played in such an atmosphere that there was a danger of physical clashes. Although the ICC match referee held a disciplinary hearing, the Sri Lankans, using well-paid lawyers, saw to it that Ranatunga got away virtually scot-free.

If the ICC were shown to be toothless, then the domestic game had little to celebrate. The fact that in the dying moments of the 20th Century women could not be members of Lord's was grotesque. MCC had one attempt to change this, bungled it, then had an expensive re-vote when, after much arm-twisting, the membership was reluctantly persuaded. But the way the change was made revealed an organisation not in tune with modern times.

This was even more dramatically emphasised for cricket as a whole when at an industrial tribunal, the England and Wales Cricket Board lost a case against a receptionist, Theresa Harrild. Amazingly the ECB decided not to be represented at the tribunal, which found for Harrild, who had complained that the ECB had pressured her to have an abortion after she had an affair with an ECB executive and then had dismissed her. The tribunal awarded her aggravated damages and in the process exposed the ECB as an organisation that seemed to be operating the sort of sexual policies not seen in the rest of the world for at least 20 years.

Such a sense of other worldliness was also evident in the time and effort it took for the ECB finally to persuade the counties that years of failure by the national team could only be addressed by a complete overhaul of the domestic game. The fact that progress was made only once the counties were assured they would not lose money should hardly fill anyone with confidence that cricket's governors can provide the sort of lead the game desperately needs.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)