Tuesday 1 November 2011

Dirty money in sport.

Today was an important day in the world of sport. Southwark Crown Court in London found the former Pakistani cricket captain Salman Butt and fast-bowler Mohammad Asif guilty of plotting to bowl deliberate no-balls in the 2010 Lord’s Test as part of a spot-fixing plot. Another player, teenager Mohammad Amir had already pleaded guilty to conspiracy to cheat and conspiracy to accept corrupt payments before the trial. The trio who had already received sporting bans from their sports may also receive prison sentences for the duplicity. Though many cricketing administrators will see this as justice, it only opens further questions of how pervasive and corrupt the game and sport as a whole is.

If you do not already know the story or have not seen the footage of the players’ misdemeanours then it is simple to explain. The News of the World (NOTW) and the ‘Fake Sheikh’ (a notorious undercover tabloid reporter) met with the UK based sports agent, Mazhar Majeed and recording him boasting that he could arrange Pakistan players to rig games for money. Majeed was paid £150,000 by the newspaper and in return Amir and Asif, following instructions from the captain Butt, bowled no-balls (an illegitimate delivery) at specific timings through the game. With foresight of the deliveries any individual could make a fortune through the vast, yet illegal; betting industry in South East Asia. Anyone watching the game may have been surprised by the errors, though it probably would have been deemed to be an aberration, yet the newspaper headlines and undercover footage led the Police to the same banknotes found in the player’s hotel rooms.

The maximum sentence for cheating is two years in jail and an unlimited fine, while accepting payments carries a maximum sentence of seven years and an unlimited fine. Unfortunately for cricket, this was not a new story. In the 1990s many players were wrongly accused of match-fixing including England’s most capped test player Alec Stewart, whereas others including the former Indian captain Mohammad Azharuddin and Pakistani captain Saleem Malik were both found guilty. The most famous case was that of Hansie Cronje, the South African captain who had led the country out of its sporting wilderness and made it one of the world’s most dominant and competitive teams. Cronje was a national hero and yet a chance find Delhi police implicated him receiving money to help fix matches. Most famously a test match between England and South Africa at Centurion Park in 2000, after a rain delayed match, Cronje forfeited an innings to see whether England could chase down the target and achieve an improbable result. Some saw it as an act of great sportsmanship, yet we now know that Cronje received £5000 and a leather jacket in return for inducing a result. The world of cricket was aghast at the news and Cronje, who would later die in a plane crash, became a fallen figure and national disgrace.

Both incidents were chance findings and tip offs. It is more than likely that the ICC would have been unable to detect these crimes without third party investigations. This is where the problem lies; the cricketers were guilty of accepting corrupt payments from unregulated bookmakers. In the West, suspicions would be raised immediately if someone bet £100,000 on a no-ball, as one statistician said the probability of calling a no-ball is around is 1.5 million to one, yet in South East Asia where gambling is illegal, who is there to police it? Some arguments have been put forward that these men were not cheating, nor influencing the result, they were simply making a bit of pocket money from a game that is not necessarily well-paid. Yet, the court heard that Butt was asked to rig the results of One-Day Internationals, a request which he says he declined. Like all cheats, there is always a complicity to break the rules; spot-fixing is just as bad taking sport enhancing drugs, who is not to say they would move onto rigging contests?

The problem for sport, not just cricket is that we just don’t know how to solve the problem and this case has simply highlighted the problem. Who is there to monitor football matches that aren’t televised or to question double faults in tennis? Sport today is about winning and money, but how much of that money is dirty?

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