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New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum has admitted he covered up alleged cricket corruption for almost three years. This is the same McCullum that many cricket followers have hailed as a shining force for good in the international game.
The same McCullum who gave an unsolicited lecture to new Australian captain Steven Smith over the Ben Stokes handled ball incident, chastising Smith for his supposed “immaturity”.
The same McCullum who cricket fans and pundits have been falling over themselves to praise since he took over as skipper, citing his team’s more attacking play and less narky demeanour.
Certainly, the McCullum-led Kiwis have been wonderfully entertaining on the pitch.
But the positive PR campaign has snowballed to the point that New Zealand have been painted as a saintly side, made up of players who could not even conceive of a sledge let alone deliver one.
When, in this year’s World Cup, Tim Southee bowled Aaron Finch, charged down the pitch and screamed in Finch’s face from so close the players’ shirt sleeves touched, there was not one mention of Southee’s behaviour.
Were the likes of Mitchell Johnson, James Anderson or Virat Kohli to have given a similar send-off it seems unlikely it would have been ignored, and quite probable it would have blown up in the media, whether mainstream or social.
You see, that would fit the prevailing narrative – that the Australians are boorish, that Anderson is a bully, that Kohli is a spoiled brat. Southee’s behaviour didn’t match the current theme about the virtuous Kiwis so it was ignored.
So will McCullum, the rider of a tsunami of good will, be held to account over the spot fixing allegations the same way as would a cricketer from Pakistan, the country with a negative narrative surrounding corruption?
Some of you may not have followed the spot fixing trial which has been taking place in London’s Southwark crown court. McCullum was called as a witness in the case against former teammate Chris Cairns, who is being accused of lying during a match-fixing libel action.
Cairns is facing charges of perjury and perverting the course of justice over the libel case he actioned against IPL founder Lalit Modi.
Cairns successfully sued Mr Modi for damages in relation to an accusation of match fixing made on Twitter in 2010.
It is now being alleged that Cairns lied during this libel hearing. During the ongoing trial in London, McCullum has alleged how Cairns tried to involve him in corruption.
McCullum alleged he was first approached by Cairns in Kolkata in April 2008. According to media outlets reporting on the trial, the New Zealand captain told the court Cairns allegedly contacted him three times in total about the spot fixing.
During the first approach, McCullum had gone to Cairns’ hotel room. Cairns had then allegedly described in intricate detail how he planned to do the spot fixing and asked McCullum to take part. McCullum says he rejected all of Cairns’ approaches.
Despite having intimate knowledge of this alleged criminal behaviour by Cairns, McCullum stayed silent on the issue for almost three years. Eventually, in February 2011, he lodged the allegations with cricket’s anti-corruption authorities.
Asked during the current trial why he had waited so long, McCullum reportedly said: “I kind of did not want it to be true. He [Cairns] was someone I looked at as a friend.”
In the recent comment piece in which McCullum criticised Smith, he made this statement: “The longer you play this game the more you realise that some things are too valuable to spoil”.
If McCullum’s allegations about spot fixing are true, then the Kiwi skipper spent almost three years allowing cricket not just to “spoil” but to become rotten to its core.
Many cricket fans practically salivate on their keyboards as they type vitriolic assessments of ‘sledgers’ like Kohli, Anderson and Johnson.
Many of the same people have juxtaposed the supposedly heinous acts of such players against the irreproachable behaviour of McCullum and his Black Caps.
In the pantheon of cricketing sins, if sledging is a single, then covering up corruption is a triple hundred.
If we are to take McCullum’s allegations as true, then the moral high ground he has built up for himself has subsided from a wave of deceit and disgrace.