MARIANNE MERTEN, Cape Town | Friday
POLYGRAPH tests, random searches of cricketers’ rooms and luggage, a duty to report improper approaches and undercover stings to test players’ honesty are among the suggestions from the King Commission of Inquiry into Cricket Match-fixing.
Proposed measures include an UCB-controlled accreditation system to contact players, the monitoring of telephone calls and e-mails, a ban on visits to players’ quarters and a duty to report any improper approaches and any information “however far-fetched” to an ethics committee.
The hard-hitting proposals on how to ensure a clean game were released on Thursday – a month before the commission is scheduled to resume its hearings into “Hansiegate”, the match-fixing scandal which led to the sacking of former Protea captain Hansie Cronje.
Although this is only an interim report, commission chairman Judge Edwin King said there was “nothing preventing any body or organisation in the cricket world from acting on these”.
At the heart of many recommendations appears to be the ease with which bookies could contact Cronje and the joking manner in which his ex-team mates brushed off their captain’s improper approaches. These include a $250000 offer to the team to throw the 1996 match in Mumbai, a request to Pieter Strydom to put a bet on the washed out game against England at Centurion last January and offers of $15000 to cricketers Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams to underperform at Nagpur.
Appointing “undercover agents who would approach players in the guise of a bookie or punter with a bogus suggestion of match-fixing or the like” should be considered.
Changes to the status and role of the national captain are also on the cards. “Loyalty to a captain is fundamentally important but it should be rational loyalty not blind loyalty actuated by adulation,” the report said. Off the field the captain must be accountable to management and the UCB.
Cricketers, like parliamentarians, should declare all gifts. Had such a system been in place when Cronje received biltong, a leather jacket and cell phone from various bookies over four years, cricket authorities could have been tipped off well before the Indian police laid charges against the ex-captain in April.
At the same time the report also suggests setting up a bursary fund, possibly through a percentage of gate takings, so that young cricketers can further their studies and secure a future past their cricket career.
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