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Indian Cricket and
Corruption
In a country where even some Olympians languished and died in penury, the money and glamour associated with cricket has taken a heavy toll on the performance of the players, who have, otherwise, surpassed the inventors of the game, the English. Kishin R Wadhwaney, a veteran sports editor who puts together over half a century of the game into this book, does not pull any punches in naming it Indian Cricket and Corruption. Of the twenty-six chapters, the only soft one is the twenty-second, titled Some Amusing Incidents. The titles of all other chapters indicate the ills that have crept into this game that has captured the imagination of the entire country, especially Kolkata. The term "cricket originally stood for fair play and sportsman’s spirit and anything else was "not quite cricket". It was perhaps a matter of time before the competitiveness and excitement of cricket attracted the business of gambling. The corruption that has set in is not confined to India alone. Television, the Internet and the cellphone have not only added glamour to the game, but also raised the monetary stakes. Match-fixing came naturally as a result, and coupled with the fashion of one-dayers, deprived cricket of its atmosphere of relaxed concentration for good, technical playing. Though large monetary awards encourage better play, these also erode the spirit of the game. The first chapter is about the Abhijit Kale episode, who is alleged to have paid Rs 10 lakh each as bribe to Kiran More and Pranob Roy, national selectors. Kale was eventually suspended for 212 days from June to December 2004. In January, 2005, he made a "winning comeback" playing for Maharashtra against Saurashtra in the Ranji West Zone one-day match. Players and officials who come up for praise are mostly from the old guard. The book is replete with incidents of failings, weaknesses, omissions and commissions of players, organisers and sponsors etc. The glorious phases do get a mention, but the negatives far outnumber these. Read about Lala Amarnath being sent back from the UK at Vizzy’s insistence, Mohammad Azharuddin being penalised for involvement in match-fixing (while others were let off) and the death of Mark Mascarenhas under mysterious circumstances. Mascarenhas became the fifth person to be honoured after his death by the Indian team by wearing black armbands. This gesture was first made in 1948, when Mahatma Gandhi was killed; the second when Indira Gandhi was assassinated and the other two were after the deaths of veteran cricketers Hemu Adhikari and Sir Don Bradman. In the chapter, A Marked Decline in Values, the author recalls that the change from the old Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai to Wankhede Stadium in the early 1970s triggered the decline in values and club culture. He refers to the former as the Mecca of Indian cricket and to the latter as the "Mecca of politics, intrigues and cliques". The decline brought complacency, indifference, lack of respect for seniors, neglect of school cricket, erosion of the cosmopolitan spirit, mushrooming of cricket academies and diminishing open spaces. State cricket organizations and their problems have also been discussed. Crowd control, or rather the lack of it, has marred many a match. Organisers often create ugly situations by selling more tickets than a stadium’s capacity to hold spectators. Duplicate tickets are also sold and the crowds, too, have become less gentle. Out of the six major incidents where matches had to be called off because of indecent crowd behaviour, three were in Kolkata, two in Ahmedabad and one in Mumbai. Ferozeshah Kotla in Delhi has its own notorious history. All the corruption and riot apart, why the country still loves its cricket is still a mystery. |
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