The squeaky-clean captain of South Africa has thrown the game into chaos. I’m not entirely bowled over
Matthew Engel
It was, as one sage put it this week, as if Queen Elizabeth had been caught fiddling her taxes. If anyone was making a book on the next cricketer to be exposed in a betting scandal, Hansie Cronje would have been available at 500 to 1.
Cronje (as of Tuesday, the ex-captain of South Africa) comes from Bloemfontein in the Boer heartland, where betting, like illicit sex, booze and racial fraternisation, could until recently still draw the full, thundering wrath of an old-fashioned Afrikaans Calvinist minister of a Sunday morning. He was regarded as upright and a little uptight, the last man anyone would have suspected of fiddling.
But only a cricket administrator could have doubted that someone was going to be exposed sooner or later. Match-rigging scandals have erupted at intervals since the first allegations against the former Pakistan captain, Salim Malik, in 1995. And every time the volcano has blown, the game’s rulers have provided the minimum possible response. Either they are wilfully stupid or they know far more than they have ever admitted; either explanation is contemptible.
South Africa will become the fourth country to hold an investigation of some kind into the connection between betting and cricketing corruption, following India, Pakistan and Australia. Not once has anyone drawn the obvious conclusion: that international cricket is now rotten to the core, and that only an investigation drawing together all the strands of evidence from across the globe is going to have any credibility whatever.
Sometimes, medical researchers cannot pinpoint the existence of an epidemic but they can identify a likely breeding ground. And cricket has now become the equivalent of a San Francisco bathhouse or a malarial swamp.
Everyone knows that poorly-paid stable lads will sometimes be tempted by rich bookmakers or gamblers to dole out inside information or nobble a favourite. Horse racing limits the problem by eternal vigilance. Cricketers are now in exactly the same position as the lads. By the standards of famous sportsmen generally, they are not well-paid. They know their life expectancy at the top is limited. Many of them come from countries with weedy currencies: the once-mighty rand has been in a terrible state since apartheid first began to totter more than a decade ago. And they now spend much of their time playing a form of the game that is absolutely ripe for manipulation: endless one-day internationals organised primarily for TV. These have little sporting credibility and offer minimal prize money. Experienced players (and journalists) approach them wearily, and often cynically.
The participants are often under- motivated and bored – in contrast to the unregulated bookmakers based in the subcontinent and the Gulf, who find these occasions absolutely entrancing. Cronje, according to Ali Bacher, managing of directorSouth Africa’s United Cricket Board, was “harassed almost continually by bookmakers” on South Africa’s recent tour of India. If he has been led into temptation, who can be surprised?
Cronje admitted taking money but denied ever being involved in rigging a match. Both these propositions could be true once you take into account the form of gambling known as “spread betting” which has become wildly popular within the past four years.
This involves treating a sporting proposition as a share price, which can be bought and sold. Thus not merely can you “buy” and back a horse to do well in a race, you can “sell” it and collect if it fails.
Under British law, these deals are not subject to the betting tax that afflict other forms of gambling. And they offer far more scope for imaginative punting than is possible down the local bookies. In cricket, you can buy or sell individual batsmen, the number of wides in a match, the time of the first boundary; one firm offered a spread on how many times John Major would be seen on TV watching World Cup matches. This week, Sporting Index, one of the market leaders, was offering match bets enabling you to choose whether Trap 4 would beat Trap 5 in a greyhound race at Peterborough, and by how much. In football, they have had spreads on the time of the first throw-in, which one Premiership team laughingly took up and punted the ball off the field straight from the kick-off. You see, no match- rigging there either. As such.
There is a lot of harmless fun here, and we have little evidence of corruption inside Britain. However, the big-money operators in Asia – notionally illegal – are, in fact, able to bet on anything with impunity and zero regulation. Naturally, they try and suborn cricketers to try and shift the odds in their favour. It’s a morass, and cricket is in it up to its neck while pretending that its big toe is just getting a little mucky.
In the 18th century, cricket was primarily a gambling game. The scandals multiplied until, in 1817, one William Lambert was chucked out of the game, and the bookmakers were kicked out from Lord’s. The ban remained for the next 150 years. The time has come to expel the money changers from the temple once again. It will take concerted, worldwide action to achieve that. Otherwise, these scandals are just going to keep on coming.
Matthew Engel is editor of Wisden