Queered pitch

Down the way, where the nights are gay, but the sun shines only on a bloodied Cup

Hardnews Bureau

Long before the Indian team left for the Caribbean islands to take part in the World Cup, strong rumours of match fixing were wafting out of cricketing quarters. "The Cricket World Cup is fixed", claimed a former Indian government official involved in investigating the role of betting syndicates in cricket matches.

At the time the investigator made this seemingly preposterous statement, no one had a clue that the allegation would find expression in the "extraordinary and evil murder", as the Jamaican police chose to describe it, of Pakistan’s coach Bob Woolmer, some 18 hours after his team lost to lowly Ireland. Woolmer’s bizarre killing in the full-up 300 room Pegasus Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, has brought to the fore the violence that has been injected by the underworld and corporate sponsorship into a game synonymous with gentlemanly conduct and fair play.

While the Jamaican police give the impression that they are still searching for the murderer, there are enough indications that they are aware of the identity of the person or persons who stealthily entered the 12th-floor room of Woolmer to smother him after he had allegedly been drugged or poisoned. The concern of the Jamaican police in delaying the announcement of the alleged killers is to ensure that the on-going World Cup is not disrupted.

Initially, the needle of suspicion was pointing at some Pakistani players who allegedly fought with the amiable Woolmer, after the match. DNA swabs were taken from all the players and matched with those inside the room where the crime was committed. Nothing, seemingly, was found and the Pakistani team was given a clean chit and allowed to fly back home.

Then who killed Woolmer and why was he killed?

Mark Shields, the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Kingston, Jamaica, is following the match fixing trail to figure out whether the Pakistani team threw the match for dirty lucre: "One aspect is, what the odds on Ireland were if Ireland won? I understand that they were extremely good if you bet on Ireland. The match fixing thing is being looked at." The odds were 8 to1 in favour of an Irish win. So the big question is: Was Woolmer killed because he threatened to spill the beans in his forthcoming book, or is there something more sinister?

Writers on cricket may not talk about it, but Woolmer was not oblivious to the criminal world of betting and fixing matches. He was the coach of the South African team when its captain, Hansie Cronje, was supping with bookies and punters and throwing away matches. Cronje may have taken the blame on himself, but there are suggestions that he was trying to save many of his team mates and others. Woolmer may not have figured in those allegations but he was surely aware of what was happening within the team, where players of the likes of Herschelle Gibbs and Nicky Boje were also mixed up with the bettors. Cronje died in a plane crash, which many believe was the handiwork of the betting mafia.

Woolmer also knew something about the Cronje affair when he went to meet the Delhi Police Commissioner, K K Paul, who busted the match fixing scandal. Subsequent news reports suggested that Paul disagreed with Woolmer’s protestations about Cronje’s innocence in fixing matches.

The match fixing scandal was later handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which conducted a detailed investigation into how the matches were thrown away by key players. The methodology adopted by the fixers was to rope in key players like team captains and pressure them to ‘do’ the results. Players like Azharuddin, Prabhakar and Jadeja were picked by the betting mafia to allegedly fix matches. The going rate at the time the CBI was investigating these cases was US $40,000 for a match. The CBI interrogated players like Kapil Dev, Manoj Prabhakar, Ajay Sharma, Siddhu and many others. The CBI report shows that grounds men, umpires and other members of the team like trainers and nutritionists, were involved in these nefarious deals.

One thing that is strikingly apparent from the CBI report is that the bettors used to try and pressure strong teams to lose their matches and get their good players to under-perform; this would net the bookies colossal profits. For instance, in the Pakistan vs Ireland match, anyone who backed cricketing minnows, Ireland, would have made a lot of money. Similarly, anyone backing Bangladesh against India would have gone laughing all the way to the bank. If these matches were indeed fixed, several players, too, would have made a lot of money.

The amount of money involved in match fixing is huge because of ‘spread betting’, where there is a wager on everything -- from who will win the toss, to the composition of the team, to who will score how much. When a player who is performing well, suddenly gets out on a stupid shot, the suspicion is raised that he has been bought over by the mafia. There are many anecdotal instances of people predicting the exact score at which a batter will get out. Surely, this cannot happen unless they are aware of the score at which the batter will exit?

There are many keen watchers of the game who are intrigued by the poor performance of established teams. If Bangladesh’s bowling was so good against India then why did its bowlers look like club-level cricketers against Sri Lanka? English cricket captain Michael Vaughan’s statement is quite illuminating: "I’ve never experienced it with my team or with any players I’ve played with or against. But my gut feeling is there is still some kind of corruption in cricket. It’s not something I’ve studied, rather the odd thing I’ve seen in games on TV." International Cricket Council (ICC) boss, Malcolm Speed, has also hinted at the shadow of corruption in these matches.

What Speed refuses to own up to is the involvement of the cricket bureaucracy in fixing cricket matches. The former Indian official, who claimed that this World Cup is fixed, also wonders why the ICC has chosen to shift its base to Dubai, which is the headquarters of the betting syndicate. Interestingly, a close friend of Woolmer, the former South Africa all rounder Clive Rice, claimed in an interview to London’s The Observer that the murdered Pakistani coach knew of the involvement of cricket officials in fixing matches: "He told me a lot that never came out. I’m not just talking about other players being involved but officials too."

The CBI report into match fixing is also intrigued by the lackadaisical attitude of the BCCI towards the issue. Without actually putting it so many words, it suggests that the BCCI officials are in cahoots with betting syndicates: "Although there is no concrete evidence to suggest the direct involvement of any of the members of the BCCI in match-fixing, their resolute indifference does give rise to suspicion that there was perhaps more than that met the eye. It defies credulity to believe that the apex body was oblivious to such rampant match-fixing and, therefore, did not find the need to investigate thoroughly the results of matches which are patently questionable." It would be illuminating to check the antecedents of many of those who comprise the BCCI and draw conclusion, thereafter, whether they can be above board when the fixers are having a free run of the game.

Woolmer’s murder shows that cricket has been shanghaied by betting syndicates, the South Asian mafia and their supporters in cricketing bodies. It will be a shame that the investigation into the horrendous murder does not become a reason to cleanse the system.

With inputs from Amitabh Sharma in Kingston, Jamaica