Match and Spot-Fixing - a Great Cricket Scandal!

Is anyone watching the Gloucestershire Glamorgan match??

No.

It seems the Bangladesh connection may be reopened, after reports that the crooks who attempted to fix matches in the BPL were offering $50,000-75,000 to English players who had appeared in the BPL to fix T20 games in England last summer.

According to Nick Hoult in the Telegraph, the ECB is "now mulling over whether to open its own investigation into the allegations."

Among the English players who appeared in the BPL were Darren Stevens, Dimi Mascerenhas, Owais Shah, Ravi Bopara, Chris Liddle and Luke Wright. I believe they were all interviewed at the time of the first ICC investigation, but only Stevens was charged with failing to report a corrupt approach. He was subsequently cleared in February 2014.

www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/news/10893508/ECB-may-investigate-allegations-of-fixing-in-county-T20-matches-after-Bangladesh-report-is-labelled-as-flawed.html

As the ECB considers whether to launch a new investigation into English players contracted in the BPL who were then allegedly approached to fix county T20 matches last summer,the full report of the recent tribunal in Bangladesh reveals that if the case is reopened it is likely to concern text messages sent to English players by Jishan Chowdhury.

The report reveals that Darren Stevens admitted under interview during the initial investigation that he received a text from Chowdhury asking him to fix an English T20 match and did not report it. This is the first time this information has been made public, as far as I am aware. Stevens claimed to the tribunal that he read only part of the message and then deleted it without reading its full contents. The ICC appears to have laid the charge based on Stevens own testimony, which it believed was an admission of failure to report on his part. But the Banglasdesh tribunal  saw it differently and concluded that the charge was unproven. Perhaps more significantly it also ruled that the charge was beyond its jurisdiction, hence the ball now lands back in the ECB's court.

If the investigation is reopened by the ECB it is not clear whether it will involve only Stevens or whether other players - including two Sussex names - will be re-interviewed about messages they may also have received from Chowdhury.

on edit: I am reliably told that 'not guilty and no jurisdiction', the ruling of the tribunal in the Stevens case, leaves the defendant in a difficult position in which potentially jeopardy has not ended. The 'no jurisdiction' ruling means not only that the tribunal had no power to find the defendant guilty but equally it had no power to clear him, either - which I suppose is the legal nicety which has caused the ECB to consider reopening the case.

Fluffy, you sound as if you'd consider condoning a cover up if the game was in danger of being disgraced?  Please clarify!

Over the years cricket has not generally suffered from corruption in any important ways. There have been practices adopted by hardened old pros and umpires with weak bladders or short tempers which have affected the conduct of the game on the field in ways which were unknown to the spectators, and they may even sometimes have affected the results of games, but they were not the results of organised attempts to fix the result or the conduct to provide profit to someone off-field.

In the last 20 years there has been steady incursion into the game by organised crime using unlicensed betting and the instaneous exposure of games all round the world through satellite tv to attract new markets and provide opportunity sometimes for the laundering of money from other criminal activities. Cricket at all levels has reacted very slowly, reluctantly and very weakly to this threat. For a long time administrators and players refused to take seriously the idea that professional cricketers had to shed the Keith Miller/Denis Compton image of the amateur punter, with their rolled up copies of Sporting Life, their friends at the racetrack, and even sometimes taking a tempting punt on ridiculous odds, such as the 500-1 Headingley 1981 bet indulged in by some of the Australians. Continuing this attitude led to Mark Waugh and Shane Warne receiving the mildest of reprimands for divulging information to bookies in the 90s, and the same disbelief that there could be any serious transgression led to the culture of hypocrisy in the South African dressing-room where the mouthings of Calvinist pietisms coexisted with the rapacity of Hansie Cronje and the exploitation of Herschelle Gibbs and other youngsters.

Only a fool could possibly have believed that the same pattern of religious prohibitions, unregulated commercial markets and widespread flouting of the law would not have infiltrated cricket in the Asian markets, as cricket became the symbol of a burgeoning materialistic middle-class. Only a foolish administrator or a knavish one would have attempted to blame all of the corruption on the ICL and continued to promote the shameless nepotism and greed of the IPL and all of those who climbed on board, without recognising that the doors were opened wide to abuse on a worldwide scale. And only a very blinkered, and impotent ICC, obsessed with its own power struggles and the mutual mistrust that they engendered, would not have realised that in exporting this model worldwide it would also export the opportunities for abuse by providing an even bigger, more wide-ranging set of stages on which they could be enacted.

So, no, I don't believe that "no-one knew anything" about corruption at any level. I am quite certain that everyone from the top of the administrative structure through to the majority of professional dressing-rooms has been aware of incidents where colleagues have been known to have had a little earner on the side, where sometimes quite blatant suggestions have been made by the pawns or middlemen like Lou Vincent, and where every agent in the structure must know that to send their players out to contracts in certain markets is to expose them to blackmail, intimidation, appeals to their not inconsiderable vanity - all of the attributes of venality. That is not to say that the game is riddled with instances of actual corruption, but that the response by most of the amateurs in charge of the game has been naive in the extreme. You only have to look at two photographs of Giles Clarke side by side - the ones with him shaking hands with Stanford after his helicopter landed, and the famous one of his sneer of distaste as he hands Mohammed Ameer the Man of the Match check - to see how far out of his depth the man is, how pathetically pleased his smirk is to be photographed over the ridiculous crate of banknotes in the former, and then his belated realisation of the effects of that kind of cupidity.

Cricket can survive it, provided it is prepared to recognise the true nature of the threat and to change in order to combat it. To change it will have to reorganise the administrative structure to boot out the marketing men, the cement and property tycoons, the part-time politicos and dodgy dealers from their positions of patronage, in favour of full-time trained and ethically balanced executives who understand the game and are aware of the temptations that professional sportsmen face. It will have to change by enforcing rigorously any attempt at inflitration by the gambling industry, including the abandonment of tempting sponsorships and associations with legal bookmakers in the UK and other countries, on the basis that you simply cannot isolate British sport from the rest of the world where gambling is not officially tolerated. It will have to change by refusing to accept that the response to allegations and the rumour of further enquiries is not to say "we look after our own and we will draw the wagons round us", but to say that all those who are innocent have nothing to fear and all those who may be guilty will be prosecuted and sentenced rigorously, without regard to their eminence, their off the field affability, their friends in the media and and amoinst toad-eating politicians.

Naved Arif pleads guilty to six charges in relation to match-fixing as a Sussex player and is banned for life. At least we won't have to keeop inserting the word "allegedly" into every reference now...

www.espncricinfo.com/england/content/story/753513.html