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There was a statement by the ICC on Monday about the match-fixing allegations in the Sydney Test between Australia and Pakistan early this year that puzzled me. According to the ICC. its officers were fully involved in scrutinising this Test, during play and after it was finished, and they came to the conclusion that it was above board.
Just to refresh a few memories: Australia was 200 runs behind on the first innings and only a few runs in front when the ninth-wicket batsman, Peter Siddle, came in to join Michael Hussey at the crease. These two pushed the score on, mainly by safe singles, to 381, an extremely big score for the third innings of the Test.
This score gave Australia a lead of 175.
At the time, I wrote on The Roar that I was deeply suspicious of the field settings, which put no pressure on either batsman during this second Australian innings. At no point were the batsmen confronted with fieldsman around their bats. They were able to push and prod their way towards high scores: in Siddle’s case 38 off 117 balls (he has a Test average of 16), with Hussey 134 not out off 284 balls.
Australia’s fightback in this third innings was helped by the wicket-keeper suffering from a case of the dropsies, with four catches being dropped from the defiant pair and an earlier run-out being spilled.
It’s history now that Pakistan were bowled out for 139, giving Australia a famous (or as it must be regarded now, an infamous) victory by 36 runs.
Fourth innings, of course, can be tricky things.
Usually when a team collapses as Pakistan did it is because the wicket has deteriorated badly. But the Sydney wicket actually improved as the Test progressed.
Australia scored at a rate of 2.86 runs an over in the first inning. Pakistan scored at a rate of 3.44 in its first innings. Australia’s rate in the second innings, even though the last pair especially played in a defensive manner, was 3.03. And in its last innings, Pakistan scored its runs at the best rate of the entire Test, at a very fast 3.66 runs an over.
Ian Chappell has summed up this Test very well. It showed that Pakistan was “either the worst cricket” or “the best at match-fixing.”
We know from its play in the first two days of the Test, and many other subsequent performances, that Pakistan is actually a strong team. So Chappell’s other supposition must come into play.
The failure of the ICC officials to have serious concerns about the way Pakistan played this Sydney Test, even when it seemed likely that something grubby was going on, reminds me of a Father Brown detective story written by G.K.Chesterton.
Father Brown was asked to solve a curious case that involved a prediction that an upper class gentleman was going to be murdered in his house. The house had been surrounded day and night, with no one being allowed to enter it. The next day the police entered the house to find the gentleman murdered.
Father Brown studied all the evidence and decided, correctly, that a milk man had committed the murder. As Father Brown pointed out, those guarding the house, with their class consciousness at work, did not regard or even see a milk man as an actual ‘person.’
Chesterton was the genius of the paradox. His point of his story is that, sometimes, something is so obvious, it is not so obvious at all.
This paradox applies, in my opinion, for the Sydney Test. The probability that there was some rigging going on in the Sydney Test is so obvious that the ICC was moved to believe that it was not obvious at all.
It has taken a newspaper with ingenuity, money and guts to do what the ICC should have done some time ago.
The News of the World is sometimes affectionately called by its readers, because of its addiction to sex scandles, as The Screws of the World. Its sting of the Pakistan player agent, Mazhar Majeed, who happened to be in Sydney during the Test, should have been an ICC operation.
The sting put on by the News of the World discovered some alleged cheating indulged in by Pakistani players during the recent Tests against England. The accuracy of the predictions made (and paid for) about when no-balls were going to be bowled, however, is as convincing a proof that the authorities need that rigging is widespread throughout the game, even in Tests like the one played at Sydney.
And if this is the case, this sort of corruption will destroy the game by forcing cricket to become a sport whose results can be manipulated by terrorist groups and corrupt bookmakers.
If readers think this is a bit alarmist they need to read Jamie Pandaram’s article on this topic ‘Spot-fixing leaves a stain on sports that will be hard to eradicate’ in Monday’s Sydney Morning Herald.
Pandaram makes a number of worrying claims and assertions.
Bob Woolmer, the former coach of Pakistan, may have been murdered because he was going to expose match-fixing.
Dawood Ibrahaim, one of the most-wanted terrorists, is apparently linked with illegal bookmakers. Ibrahaim has links to Osama bin Laden. Bookmakers, it seems, make fixes with some of the players.
They then place bets based on these fixes with other bookmakers. One Indian bookmaker caught by such a sting who refused to pay up was found chopped to pieces.
Big money is involved.
It has been suggested, for instance, that something like $A400 million is gambled on each major Test or ODI in India alone. And remember, too, that Majeed boasted to the News of the World that he had earned $1.3 million from fixing the Sydney Test.
While I was thinking about all this, I had a Father Brown moment.
I’ve never believed that the objection by the Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, West Indian, South African and Zimbabwean authorities to the possibility of John Howard becoming head of the ICC was based on the fact that he had been a politician and that he had questioned Murali’s bowling action.
It now seems to me to very clear that the real objection lay in the fact that Howard might just be the man with the inclination and the political talents to clean up cricket. For all the criticisms of Howard, it has to be said that he has always been prepared to take tough actions to prevent things he sees as great evils.
He confronted irate members of the gun lobby, for instance, at a mass meeting wearing a bullet proof vest.
He told them that his government was going to enforce a buy-back of firearms and exercise much stronger controls than in the past. The gun lobby never forgave him. But research has just come out that his stringent gun laws have saved 200 people from committing suicide a year in Australia.
There are calls for an official investigation into the Sydney Test.
This is really scratching the surface of the problem. Ian Chappell reckons that ‘corruption is rife’ in cricket. Clearly the surveillance regime imposed by the ICC is not working.
Something more substantial and effective is needed.
The solution, if there is a solution, is obvious. John Howard, a cricket tragic in the best sense of the word and a fearless politician, should be asked to chair a well-funded commission that investigates the full extent of corruption in the game. He should then be given the resources to put his commission’s recommendations into practice.
Newspaper investigations can expose the rottenness that is eating away at the integrity of cricket. Only the game itself can clean up the mess, if it has the will to do so. The time to do this is right now.
And cricket has the man who can do this.