The voices are soft, well-spoken. The tone is matter-of-fact. But for the piles of cash accumulating on the coffee table, the exchange could be the negotiation of an everyday investment opportunity.
Yet the News of the World video of Mazhar Majeed apparently accepting cash on behalf of Pakistan’s cricketers to bowl no-balls on demand deserves to become a motif of cricket in the 21st century, as West Indian pace was to the 1980s and Warne wizardry was to the 1990s.
It’s the normality of the transaction that actually makes it so disturbing. It gives an ordinary, even a pleasant face to cricket corruption, like that of the polite, inconspicuous Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, whom Gatsby then explains is the infamous World Series fixer. ‘It never occurred to me,’ muses Nick Carraway, ‘that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.’
What the video proves exactly will ultimately be for lawyers to decide. But what it and the other footage of Majeed excitedly expositing his schemes show in general is cricket struggling, haplessly and helplessly, with its Asian economic miracle. In the last three years, an ancient pastoral English game has become the biggest wealth engine in sport on the Indian sub-continent. With the breakneck expansion of the Indian economy, massive television rights fees and a herd of corporate investors have promoted a tournament, the Indian Premier League, which has monetised cricket as never before. Short, sharp, exuberant, noisy games of Twenty20 cricket played between privately-owned clubs based in India’s main cities fill grounds and cram airwaves—part sport, part soap opera, part Bollywood movie.
The IPL’s growth into a brand valued at $US4 billion has not just split cricket but shivered it to fragments. The game’s old multilateral governance system is in disarray, its nominal administration, the International Cricket Council, having been superceded in influence by the Board of Control for Cricket in India, a round table of self-interested politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen.
Cricket’s old hierarchy of values has also been set at nought. Players can now earn millions of dollars in a few weeks of three-hour cricket games. The rewards for traditional five-day cricket are in most countries paltry by comparison—in Pakistan they are downright derisory.
Cricketers have been divided as never before into haves and have-nots, those inside the gilded circle and outside. The world’s best-paid player, a very good although not great wicketkeeperbatsman called MS Dhoni who nonetheless looks a treat and sprinkles gold dust on those products he endorses, is estimated by Forbes to pull down more than $11 million annually. Pakistan’s teen speed sensation Mohammad Amir, meanwhile, earns less than $30 000 a year on his national contract, topped up with Test fees less than half those enjoyed by Australian and English players.
The effects of this disequilibrium are being felt even in Australia. In his new diary, The Captain’s Year, a chagrined Ricky Ponting describes an Australian team meeting in February to discuss the advisability of players taking up IPL invitation in light of doubts about security arrangements. Ponting, anxious for a collective decision, found that the ‘one-in, all-in’ ways of yesteryear no longer applied. ‘A few of the guys who are involved solely in the IPL put it pretty bluntly they … want to go their own way,’ he reports euphemistically. Australian cricketers are at least amply-rewarded, and tend to shrink from the sight of unfamiliar men with bulging chequebooks. Where cricket’s new order has placed the gravest strain is on those countries and cricketers deprived of recent bounties.
For there is an underside to mass Asian prosperity: a black economy that accounts for nearly a fifth of India’s GDP, and perhaps as much as half of Pakistan’s. It is money, almost always cash, in headlong pursuit of superior returns, and the best are often available through illegal gambling. It’s estimated that Asian gamblers wager as much as $US500 million on games of cricket which, thanks to the power of satellite television, can come from anywhere: it could be a Test, an IPL fixture, a one-day international in Australia or a T20 game between English counties. The betting need not concern results. The new scourge is spot-fixing—the practice of gambling on specific incidents and variables, like the running total at the end of each over. If this seems akin to betting on flies on a wall, the rewards, and thus the value of inside information, are potentially huge. Bookmakers on the sub-continent are myriad and mistrustful of one another. Plunges—colossal bets spread across multiple bookies—are therefore easy to engineer.
Pakistan had much to offer cricket’s exciting, rich, T20-centric new world. Its cricketers are skilful, aggressive, flamboyant. They starred in the first IPL. They won last year’s World Twenty20 with cricket of glorious abandon. Their country, however, is at the war on terror’s ravaged frontline, dogged by collapsing institutions and accumulating hatreds. President Asif Ali Zardari was rattling around his French chateau while twenty million of his countrymen were recently displaced by a natural disaster, foreign relief for which was grudging because of the conviction most would be corruptly rerouted.
Zardari is also patron of the Pakistan Cricket Board, a nest of cronies chaired by the brother-in-law of the country’s defence minister, which metes out life bans as flippantly as a teacher giving detentions, but which protects to the point of impunity those it favours. It is probably no coincidence that one of the bowlers allegedly in Majeed’s pay was Mohammad Asif, who has twice tested positive for banned substances but escaped without punishment.
Unsurprisingly given the interpenetration of politics and cricket, Pakistan’s cricket fortunes have been a faithful index of its collapse into chaos. As the security situation has worsened, opportunities to play have dried up. The country’s only attempt to host an inbound tour in the last three years ended in a hail of bullets; its team played no Tests at all in 2008. This isolation was exacerbated at the end of that year by the Mumbai attacks, which in causing the collapse in Pakistan’s relations with India not only deprived its cricketers of their marquee Test series, but led to their exclusion from the IPL. The scenario fits the evidence now presented by News of the World—that, deprived of a share in cricket’s legitimate economic miracle, the players sought solace in its illegitimate parallel.
Some efforts have been made in the last year to rehabilitate Pakistan cricket: they have been hosted in England these last ten weeks for three Tests against Australia and four against the home team. The rehab has run the same course as that of Ben Cousins, with some great days, some mediocre, and a few nightmarish.
Pakistan’s pace attack may be the world’s most exciting. Ironically just a day before the News of the World’s revelations, former England captain Nasser Hussain was arguing that Amir and Asif had revived the electric thrill of high-quality new-ball bowling: ‘I’ve heard a lot of chat this summer from some of the more experienced players about how much the ball is doing and how hard it has been for batting. To which I’d say: welcome to proper Test cricket.’ The day after, however, looked less like proper Test cricket than a play by Nobel laureate cum opening batsman Harold Pinter, all menacing pauses and mumble insinuations. The expressions of the home team as Pakistan’s batsmen resumed can best be described as of cold fury. As he handed Amir the man of the series award, the England Cricket Board chairman resembled a lofty diner served a rotting fish.
The worst outcome—and cricket exhibits a rare talent for finding these—will now not be the substantiation of the allegations, but the opposite. The difficulty in making a case based on the News of World’s sting is that the evidence is powerful but largely circumstantial, unless it can be demonstrated that at least some of the cash found its way from Majeed to the players. Even then, for an offence to have been committed under English law, a party must be proven to have been defrauded—and illegal gamblers are hardly about to assert their legal rights.
If no prosecutions occur, cricket will be left with a kind of Typhoid Mary in its midst—a participating team nobody will wish contact. Avaricious spot-fixers and venal players will be further emboldened. If a case cannot be made in England, with its sophisticated police force and centuries of jurisprudence, what chance that overtaxed and under-resourced Asian authorities will ever catch up? That will leave the ICC to clean up the mess—a matter of expecting a solution from part of the problem. On it will then depend our chances of again looking at a game of cricket without wondering whether it is not simply the front on a crooked casino.