Match-fixing in Indian cricket

These are three of several articles I wrote in The Economic Times, Kolkata edition, during the period 1997-2000 on match-fixing in Indian cricket. They seem relevant even today and also point to the complicity of the BCCI in allowing match-fixing in Indian cricket to go on even now despite the matter being exposed at least 16 years earlier.

Article 1

The irony of postmodern cricket

By Arjun Sen

“The avant garde (modern) destroys, defaces the past……..The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot be really destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would have put it, I love you madly.” At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony……..But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.

Irony, metalinguistic play, enunciation squared. Thus, with the modern, anyone who does not understand the game can only reject it, but with the postmodern, it is possible not to understand the game and yet to take it seriously.  Which is, after all, the quality (the risk) of irony. There is always someone who takes ironic discourse seriously. ………The postmodern discourse…demands, in order to be understood, not the negation of the already said, but its ironic rethinking.”

– Umberto Eco in Postscript to The Name of the Rose.

Traditional Test cricket had its moments of glory before the arrival of the avant garde protesters disillusioned with what apparently was a slow moving game spread over as long as five days.

The modern heretics – Kerry Packer and Company – challenged and changed the pre-modern sport. Then, One Day Internationals (ODIs) became the name of the game.

There was the day-night innovation. Payjama cricket (bedroom cricket, if you will, for the couch potatos, trying not to miss even a second of the dying moments of a nail-biter even as the Sun is getting ready to get out of bed) has revolutionised the imperial game.

There was the sudden cramming of the international cricket calender. It was no more the game of the kings. The hoi polloi had taken over. Cricket for the masses, cricket for the market. “To market, to market to buy a fat evening of cricket entertainment,” ran the new nursery rhyme. The rules of the game had changed. The modernisers had tried to destroy and deface the pre-modern game and mould it to the modern, market-driven version.

But the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. No more is it possible to think of a cricket game as just a game as it once was. No more is it possible to accept the glorious uncertainties of the game innocently. One can do so only with irony -only with the sure knowledge that whatever be the uncertainties of the game it was now being played with the certainty of making profits.

The postmodern game was then born. When Test cricket’s widely-acknowledged master batsman hit a century in an ODI with a strike rate close to 100 but using only approved Test cricketing shots (Sunil Gavaskar’s century against New Zealand in the Reliance World Cup in 1987), we witnessed an attempt at entering the postmodern era of modern cricket. An attempt to revisit the past but not innocently, not in the way one would score a century in Test cricket but instantly, as it were, despite trying to do so with certainty and solidity by sticking to Test cricket’s time-tested batting techniques.

When controversies break out about match-fixing and betting in cricket, we again are witness to symptoms of postmodernity in the sport. The market has taken over, the game can never again be played in the same way that it used to be played in the past. The glorious uncertainties of the game have become a liability for those seeking certain profit. So the game had to be reinvented, or revisited if you will.

The outcomes had to be certain but the game had to still wear the veneer of uncertainty. A new metalanguage became necessary. So that inexplicable inconsistencies could be explained consistently using an impossible text. Five wickets in a match? That was excellent bowling! Never mind the fact that all the wickets were the result of some extremely poor batting.

Flat wickets, no turn, no movement! Never mind the fact that swinging the ball in the air and getting movement in the air has nothing to do with the nature of the pitch. Or, for that matter, never mind the fact that to get the ball to turn you had to have the ability and the intention to do so. Or, never mind the fact that the same bowler, bowling on the same pitch is able to get movement one day and can manage to bowl only as straight as a ray of light the next. As long as poor bowling (or batting) could always be explained by an impossible text – in this case the flat nature of the pitch – you could create certain outcomes despite wearing the veneer of uncertainty.

And as long as commentators, critiques and consumers of the game were willing to ride along – willing to think of the modern game as to be the same as the pre-modern one – despite knowing that everybody knows that it is not so – the postmodern discourse on cricket could go on.

As long as we can still think of cricket as the game of glorious uncertainties despite knowing with certainty that it cannot possibly have remained so given the pressures of making sure profits, the magic reality of postmodern cricket will continue to find millions of takers.

India can then win the Sahara Cup beating Pakistan convincingly in the first three matches of a five match series despite both sides playing some extremely poor cricket. Debashis Mohanty can bowl well to make a winning contribution and yet fail to get mentioned by his skipper Sachin in the post-match press conference. Indian cricket fans can again think of the national team cricketers as heroes. Saurav Ganguly can become the Man of the Match in the crucial deciding game although it is the Pakistanis who inexplicably chose to gift him all of five wickets. India has won but cricket has lost. But then, that is the irony of postmodern cricket.

Article 2

Match-fixing in Indian cricket (this may not be the actual heading as published in ET)

By Arjun Sen

At last the veil of secrecy is being lifted on India’s worst kept secret. Slowly but steadily evidence – albiet only circumstantial evidence – is piling up that match-fixing is on in Indian cricket.

For many of us avid cricket followers, a recent report on the subject in a weekly news magazine has come as no surprise. That there was something extremely mysterious about the performances of the Indian team has been known to us ever since the early eighties when India first began to emerge as a major cricketing force. In fact, one can even pin it down to the time from when master batsman Sunil Gavaskar became India’s captain.

In those early days, we tried to explain those mysterious performances by thinking that it is part and parcel of the new professionalism that has appeared in Indian cricket and the non-performance of certain top players in inexplicable ways was just a way of team building. Something that happens in all other professionalised team sports such as soccer. For, after all, you cannot groom new players unless you thrust upon them a heavy workload under trying circumstances.

Take for example, the Delhi Test against Pakistan in the early eighties where Dilip Vengsarkar scored a brilliant century to save the match for India after India had lost both their then top batsmen – Sunil Gavaskar and Gundappa Viswanath – very cheaply and that too in uncharacteristic fashion.

If Gavaskar and Vishwanath always bat well then other batsmen will never get a chance to play a long innings under pressure. So, they will never get a chance to realise their full potential. From the team point of view, therefore, established players should once in a while take it a little easy on the field to give newcomers a chance to prove their mettle.

This made a lot of sense so that even when a Gavaskar or a Vishwanath got out to atrocious schoolboy shots it was surprising but not altogether incomprehensible. You could see the benefits to the team when top players did not monopolise all the action.

In fact, that Delhi Test was the turning point in Vengsarkar’s career. From that Test onwards, he never looked back till his retirement in the early nineties. And before that Test everyone knew he had the potential but he was failing to realise it.

Hence, even if we then felt that perhaps Gavaskar or Vishwanath had deliberately played poor shots to get out cheaply, we felt it was all being done in the best interests of the team.

One would like to believe that such things happen even today and that top players every now and then take it a little easy on the field to thrust younger players into tight situations and in the process check out who among them have the temperament and the class to continue to play at the highest levels of the game.

Of course, at any level of the game this is the only way a really good, balanced team can be built up. A team which does not have to depend on the performance of just one or two players but which has the batting and bowling depth to emerge winners even on days when the top players fail for whatever reason.

The key to such team building is to use not-so-important matches for trying out new players, forcing them to play under difficult circumstances and thereby giving them the chance to come good even in those difficult circumstances so that they gain confidence which is vital for performing well when the team most needs such good performance. In the process, of course, the team may lose a match or two since the top players did not play to their full potential. But the long term benefits to the team more than compensate such defeats in what are relatively less important matches.

On the other hand, teams which do not follow such a policy and instead ask their top players to always play to their full potential and always try to win are likely to end up having just one or two good players who always monopolise the action.

The rest of the team members then remain minnows for all practical purposes despite having played a lot of matches in terms of numbers but not in terms of actual exposure with the result that they lack the experience of playing under pressure cooker situations and therefore lack that vital ingredient – confidence.

Ultimately, such teams often find that in a crucial match, say in the finals of a tournament, the law of averages catches up with the top players, they fail and the entire team goes down without putting up even the semblance of a fight.

Moreover, in long-drawn tournaments in team games such as soccer or hockey, it is common knowledge that coaches often do not field the best team in the early, easier rounds, nor do they ask the players to strive too hard in the early matches but instead try to pace their effort in a manner such that the team peaks at the right time — may be in the semi-finals and the finals — the two toughest matches that must be won to win the tournament.

Also, if you do not always play to your full potential then you can keep your opponents guessing as to your real strengths and weaknesses. In fact, teams can even play to a deliberately worked out strategy of consistently showing itself to be weak in a certain area where in reality it is actually strong so that in a crucial match when the opponents come with a plan of exploiting that weakness they get the surprise of their lives. After all, the element of surprise is vital to winning battles be it on the battlefield or the cricket field.

For example, a batsman who is actually very strong on the offside may deliberately get out to offside deliveries in a few non-crucial matches giving opponents the impression that he is weak on the offside. On the crucial day, when opponents try to play to a plan of bowling to this batsmen on the offside they get badly hit in the first few overs. By the time they realize what is happening the match may have slipped out of the hands of the opponents. This is a somewhat naive and simplistic example but I hope it does bring out the point.

In the early eighties, watching India play and lose matches due to the unexpected failure of top players at times seemed to us surprising but one could also see that often as a result of such failures new, younger players were getting a chance to prove themselves and thereby become valuable assets to the team.

This was more so in the case of lower order batsmen and second string bowlers who normally would not be expected to do much because of the presence of other established heavyweights in the team.

For example, one remembers an extremely exciting ODI against Pakistan at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi __ perhaps the first day-nighter in Indian cricket history – which India won due to some excellent lower order batting by Madan Lal, Roger Binny and Kirmani after all the other heavyweights had got out with India still needing some sixty odd runs to be scored at a brisk pace of over eight runs an over.

It is therefore, possible to claim that there is a flip side – a positive side – to not always playing to full potential. But this sort of strategic cricket cannot be called deliberate tanking for purposes of betting although in certain matches India may have lost when the result should actually have been a victory. And although there is no documentary evidence or even circumstantial evidence to prove that from the late seventies or early eighties Indian teams have been playing in this strategic manner except this ‘simple’ matter of the inexplicable nature of certain poor performances which can easily be passed off as merely being evidence of the so-called glorious uncertainties of cricket, the fact remains that India managed to become a world power in cricket during this period winning the World Cup in 1983 and then the Benson & Hedges Cup in Australia in 1985.

So, if there was any deliberate strategic underpotential play in certain matches, in the crucial matches at least, India did emerge victorious and there was no suspicion of deliberate tanking for betting purposes even though in certain not so crucial matches one could see some absolutely inexplicable performances from top players leading to defeats for the team.

The 1987 Reliance World Cup was a different cup of tea altogether. For the first time, we got to see some absolutely inexplicable performance by the Indian team in as crucial a match as the semi-final against England at Mumbai which India lost. Here was the first occasion when India was losing in a crucial match for what seemed to be non-cricketing reasons.

Otherwise, why should two left arm spinners suddenly switch to bowling to Gooch and Gatting on their leg and middle stumps although in their first few overs the two batsmen were clearly uncomfortable against an off-stump/outside off stump line?

Why were there huge gaps in the leg side even after Gooch and Gatting had made it clear that the only shot they were going to apply to the left arm spinners was the sweep shot and why was the leg side at last strengthened only after the two English batsmen had already done the damage?

Why did India decide to field first even after winning the toss despite knowing very well that in one day cricket it is almost always easier to set a target rather than chase one unless the pitch was clearly going to behave badly in the first half (it did not) or the weather was clearly against those batting first (it was not)?

Why did Azhar and Kapil get out to atrocious shots? Why did master batsman Sunil Gavaskar suddenly develop a huge gap between bat and pad – something that one does not expect to see even among good club level cricketers and yet here was the world’s best batsman with a brilliant century behind him in just the previous match showing such a horrible technical deficiency?

Why did Kapil who saw a man being shifted to deep mid-wicket in just the previous ball still try to lift the very next ball exactly in the direction where a man had been shifted to in just the previous ball? There were no reasonable answers to these and many other questions. It all seemed to be an inexplicable act of collective harakiri by some of the world’s best cricketers.

It is from then on that some of us have begun to think that India’s performances on the cricket field cannot be explained by cricketing reasons alone. Even what may seem to some as a new approach – the idea of strategic cricket – could not quite explain what was happening on the field. The strategic cricket explanation is fine as long as the team keeps on winning crucial tournaments but it fails horribly as an explanatory theory when you see weird inexplicable cricket on the field leading to defeat in such a crucial match as a World Cup semi-final.

Examples of such inexplicable and weird games can be multiplied – for example, the 1996 World Cup semi-final against Sri Lanka at the Eden Gardens. Again we found India electing to field despite winning the toss on an entirely unknown newly-laid pitch. And nobody knows better than the Indian team how much more difficult it is to bat under the lights at Eden Gardens with all those crackers going off making the atmosphere smoky and hazy which is over and above all the other usual difficulties of batting under lights.

Then there was that absolutely stunning collapse. Everything was hunky dory when suddenly Sachin took a casual walk from the crease for no apparent reason only to be stumped out. Azhar came, played forward lazily with head held high in a manner that even a schoolboy cricketer who has received some coaching would never do. Srinath was promoted in the batting order again for no apparent reason since the Sri Lankans had piled up only a modest total and there was no cricketing reason to send in Srinath to push up the scoring rate. Srinath’s run out was equally baffling. And before you could say Lanka, from an apparently simple winning situation the Indians had put themselves into a hopeless situation. No wonder the crowd turned violent as they simply could not digest the absolutely weird cricket that was going on in the middle.

Article 3

 I am reproducing here the exact file that went out to other editions of Times of India that night – most probably on the first Saturday of August, 1997.

REs/NEs/Sport Editors: TOI ALL EDITIONS

We are using this on our sports pages tonight under the Freewheeling column. Please consider this for use in your sports pages:  Gautam Bhattacharya, ETC

Freewheeling

 “Why are you giving excuses Mr Gavaskar?”

 By Arjun Sen

 “Unfortunately, the controversies have sapped their confidence and they are wondering about aimlessly in the field. If it was too much cricket earlier, it is too many questions about their integrity now. If those asking the questions are really interested in Indian cricket, they must either supply the answers or stop asking questions!”

– Sunil Gavaskar in ET, Calcutta, 29.7.1997.

 Mr Sunil Gavaskar, former master batsman and presently top expert, has once again expressed his displeasure about questions being asked about Indian cricket. Clearly, he would have been happier if Indian cricket fans, instead of asking uncomfortable questions, learned to become “sporting” enough to enjoy watching their national team lose time and again in an international match and that too in a humiliating, spineless, pathetic fashion and without appearing to be putting up a fight to the best of their abilities.

We have heard a lot about there “being no question about the world class ability and potential in some of the members of the team,” but the problem is that the team almost never seems to be playing to its potential.

To put the record straight, if questions are being asked today about the team’s integrity then it is the team to blame and not those asking the questions.

It is the poor performances of the Indian team in recent times – for example, at St Vincent’s against the West Indies or the defeat at the hands of even lowly-placed Zimbabwe in Zimbabwe during India’s last tour to the African continent, or the losses to Pakistan in the Sahara Cup in Canada and the list can go on – which have led to the asking of questions.

So, if somebody now says that the poor performances are a result of questions being asked, it sounds too much like an expert excuse. The questions came after poor performances and not the other way round.

But then, Mr Gavaskar would probably argue, given his views quoted above, that the earlier poor performances were due to too much cricket. And before that, the poor performances were due to too little cricket in the recent past and the consequent rustiness. And now it is the controversies that are affecting performance.

As far as excuses go, this is all very fine, very expertly thought out. But what about other teams? While India played 36 One Day Internationals during the period June, 1996 to June, 1997 with a success rate of 30.6 per cent, Pakistan played 44 ODIs in the same period with a success rate of 56.8 per cent, Sri Lanka played 26 matches with a success rate of 61.53 per cent, and South Africa played 23 matches with a success rate of 69.56 per cent. Only Australia played 23 matches but had a success rate close to India’s at 30.4 per cent.

In other words, none of the major Test playing nations except the West Indies (15 matches with a 60 per cent success rate), have played less than 23 matches during the same period and if we take into account the overall schedule of ODIs in world cricket today, instead of choosing any artificial cut off points like June, 1996, then it becomes clear that for any team, playing between 30-40 matches per year has become the norm rather than the exception.

If one has to succeed, one has to do so given this basic parameter. Poor performance because of excessive cricket is, therefore, at best a lame excuse and at worst a deliberate attempt to gloss over the real ills of Indian cricket.

As for controversies arising on the question of team selection, well, the question is should the captain of a team express lack of faith in his players at the beginning of a tournament or should he have waited for the tournament to end and then given his views about team selection? Again in this case too, it is the team captain rather than people who are not “really interested in Indian cricket” who are raising questions and creating controversies.

We have also heard a lot about how the game is so different at the “highest level” and how there are always people dime a dozen at every street corner who dare to comment on various aspects of the game without having any inkling about what the game is all about at the highest level.

But Mr Gavaskar, does playing at the highest level give anybody the right to show a total lack of commitment to the game and to the country’s honour? Because that is what we, poor Indian cricket fans, are watching day in and day out.

Like in any other sport, in cricket too, winning and losing is all part of the game and no one minds losing as long as one’s favourite team goes down fighting. But when you see the same team losing in a callous fashion despite having in the team players with undoubted caliber, it is then that accepting defeat becomes so difficult and it is then that fans ask uncomfortable questions.

And, it is then that one feels that perhaps we could do with a team of players who have never played at the so-called highest level but who are at least not short on commitment or fighting spirit. We may still continue to lose but those defeats won’t hurt because we will see that the team has lost despite everyone trying his best to uphold national pride. Defeats then will not surely lead to asking uncomfortable questions.

Many of us cricket fans not only in India but all over the world have always looked up to you, Mr Gavaskar, as perhaps the greatest batsman in the history of cricket. Many of us have also learnt a lot about the game from you albeit from a distance – much like Eklavya in The Mahabharata who watching from a distance learnt from Dronacharya teaching his disciples.

Hence, today, it hurts to find that you have chosen to use your world-acknowledged expertise in cricket to provide excuses for the Indian team’s pathetic performances on the field and in the process try to shut up those who have been forced to ask questions regarding the team’s performance out of the sense of humiliation and anguish that comes from watching the team lose even in situations when it should never have lost.

So, why are you doing this Mr Gavaskar?