The cricket insider spoke slowly and softly,
“If the public knew how much of it went on they would be shocked and disgusted and the game would die.”
He went on,
“It’s the talk of every dressing room and so is the famous cricketer who does it in the Indian Premier League.”
Then he mentioned the late Bob Woolmer.
“Most people think he was about to expose it and was taken out.”
Strong stuff but the insider declined to put his name to it.
The 2010 English summer began with the arrest of Essex cricketers Mervyn Westfield and Danesh Kaneria.
They were accused of spot-fixing - a niche area of gambling where bets are laid with illegal bookmakers on specific occurrences during a match.
Last month Westfield was charged with conspiracy to defraud. Kaneria, a Pakistan spin bowler, faces no further action.
But the extent of spot-fixing in cricket was exposed during Pakistan’s tour.
On August 29th the News of the World revealed how two Pakistan bowlers and their captain delivered a £150,000 spot-fixing betting coup during the 4th Test at Lords.
England refused to play the subsequent one-day series unless the three were suspended. Scotland Yard began an investigation as did the International Cricket Council.
England won the first two games of five and were hoping to wrap up the series at the Oval.
Your correspondent covered the game in south London and it was a cracker.
The tourists batted first and made 241 all out off all but two balls of their 50 overs.
England had a chance of winning until Umar Gul ripped through the lower order and Pakistan won by 23 runs.
The restoration of faith lasted less than ten hours.
The next day The Sun newspaper disclosed the fix was in and had told the authorities before the game started. The ICC tried to call the game off but failed and, as predicted, the scoring rate slowed significantly during the 39th and 40th overs.
Does it matter? After all, spot-fixing has little or no effect on the outcome of a game, nobody notices and nobody gets hurt.
Except they do.
Woolmer was coaching Pakistan at the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies when, after a defeat by Ireland in Jamaica, he met a sudden and messy demise.
The Times reported,
“...the white-tiled bathroom floor (and) the walls were splattered high and wide with vomit, his body was surrounded by pools of blood and excrement, and a bone in his neck had snapped.
An inquest returned an open verdict.
Five years earlier former South Africa captain Hansie Cronje was killed in a plane crash. He was serving a lifetime ban from playing and coaching after admitting he fixed games.
An inquest blamed the pilots.
And then, earlier this month, David Le Cluse, the chairman of Croydon Athletic Football Club, was found dead with a gunshot wound to the the head.
The club’s owner, Mazhar Majeed, is an agent with close links to the Pakistan cricket team and was one of those arrested over the spot- fixing allegations.
The inquest has yet to be held.
None of this is news to people close to the game. A friend and colleague, who loves cricket almost as much as he loves his wife-to-be, dismisses it as a conspiracy theory.
He may be right but fraud has taken root in a sport that already suffers from meaningless matches, flat pitches, negative tactics, poor attendances and formulaic formats.
Corruption is the straw that broke the camel’s bat.
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