‘Ashes Match Fix Probe’ screams the poster for today’s Evening Standard, fulfilling two criteria for competent headline writing: strict factual accuracy and disingenuous sensationalism. The ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit is investigating reports of an indeterminate conversation between a figure ‘suspected of links to illegal bookmaking’ and an unidentified Australian cricketer, who promptly reported the matter to the authorities. No information was exchanged, no inducement offered—it’s hardly Meyer Wolfsheim.
But memories of the cupidity and venality of cricketers ten years ago do not take much to revive, and corruption has been a nagging fear since Twenty20 began to go forth and multiply a couple of years ago. A precondition of the moral lapses of Hansie Cronje and others was a surfeit of pointless, meaningless cricket: the spread of Twenty20 contains the seeds of a repeat of that phenomenon. The Indian Cricket League’s reputation was as a hotbed of gambling, and even the IPL did not help its profile by rejecting the assistance of the ACU.
There’s no reason to think that Test cricket has been compromised since the Condon report. The players seem well aware of their responsibilities, and also of the penalties, since the investigations into Marlon Samuels and Maurice Odumbe. On the other hand, it’s a pity administrators continue to stack the schedules so pointlessly and heedlessly. Seven one-day internationals between Australia and England after the Oval Test? Fifty-nine IPL matches in six weeks? What better means of creating the kind of jaded, disaffected automata who slipped into malpractice a decade ago? Sooner or later, I fear, a newspaper will publish a sensational headline that exactly suits a case both in circumstances and seriousness.