Once cricket was tagged and known as the ‘gentlemen’s’ game. The game was born and nurtured in England and it initially took root among the upper echelons of society. Until 1962 there was a clear divide between the gentlemen and the players – with gentlemen with amateur status as against the players who were professionals. Since then all cricketers who indulge in the higher forms of the game of cricket have become professionals.
More so the game from being a Test-cricket-centred one has changed and the accent and the ‘eye of the storm’ has shifted with the advent of its by-products of the pyjama versions -- the 50 overs-a-side game and the T-20 version.
Test cricket withstood the test of time and the purest form of the game stood almost unblemished with the closest to a controversy being the 1932-33 Ashes series between England and Australia – an encounter that was later dubbed as the “bodyline series’. Besides that, Test cricket’s name remains untarnished.
Though the limited overs cricket (60 and 50 overs) initially was adopted to inject adrenaline to a wilting game as the cricket pundits thought at that time, its first controversy came when the Australian millionaire Kerry Packer along with his cricketing brain Tony Greig introduced the coloured clothing and floodlit cricket. It was a cricketing branch that broke away from the accepted norms and it was called the Packer series.
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| Top and bottom pictures show detainees after the raid party in which IPL spinner Wayne Parnell and Rahul Sharma who play for Pune Warriors were implicated. (Pictures courtesy Times of India) |
With the innovative form or the 50-over pyjama version -- like any bad thing that spreads among the humans – becoming popular, the Middle Eastern venue of Sharjah became the next base.
Sharjah became the hotbed of international limited overs cricket, but, suddenly the guns stopped booming because the rot had set in and it was said that many a bad deal had taken place at this cricketing oasis. Sharjah almost died as a venue in spite of its state-of-the-art facilities. This was way back in 2001.
Thereafter the chariot kept moving without much hassle till someone in England saw even the 50 over game losing its mettle and derived cricket’s second adrenaline injection in the form of T-20 cricket.
The first T-20 cricket carnival happened in July 2006 where nineteen Caribbean regional teams competed in what was named the Stanford 20/20 tournament.
The tournament was financially backed by US-based billionaire Allen Stanford, who gave at least US$ 28,000,000 for it. It was intended that the tournament would be an annual event and Guyana won the inaugural event winning US$ 1,000,000, but all the euphoria crash-landed when Stanford was convicted of some shady deals and sentenced to a jail term. The West Indian T-20 carnival died a natural death.
The first ICC sponsored T-20 World Championship was held in South Africa in 2007 where India defeated Pakistan in the final. For India who had first won the World Cup 50 overs tournament in 1983, this was a huge spur.
 In the chain reaction of events first it was the Indian Cricket League; brain tuned once again by Tony Greig and then hijacked by the BCCI through Lalith Modi who hatched the Indian Premier League, better known as the IPL in 2008.
From the very inception IPL ran more on one rail of morality. It did not take long for trouble to brew at the top with franchise problems and Modi, who was virtually the most influential person on earth in cricket as the chairman and the commissioner of the IPL, being dethroned and then even forced to leave the country.
In the post-Modi era, instead of reforming itself, the Indian multinational local tournament has continued to go over the spill of corruption and controversy and now it has begun to cast shadows on individual players over a plethora of charges.
In the Indian parliament, former Indian cricketer Kirti Azad who was a member of the 1983 World Cup winning squad, demanded a special audit into the conduct of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. He also demanded that BCCI be brought under the Right to Information Act (RTI).
The former cricketer also accused the BCCI of being tainted by greed and the lust for money in the IPL and demanded transparency in the league's functioning.
Incidents such as spot-fixing allegations involving five uncapped domestic cricketers, the Team Kolkata co-owner Shah Rukh Khan's spat with the Mumbai Cricket Association officials and molestation charges against Bangalore player Luke Pomersbach have tarnished the image of the IPL.
The worst is yet to come. The Times of India which initially talked about a Lankan player who received Rs. 100 million to fix an IPL match continued with another story which would keep us agape. The follow-up of that story talks about “A day after Mumbai police arrested Sonu Yogendra Jalan and Devendra Sripal Kothari for their alleged role in running a betting racket, the Delhi police's crime branch confirmed that at least one of these names had also cropped up in the list of 170 suspects scheduled to fly out to Colombo to try and fix games with the help of call girls.
“Further, links have also been established between the same bookies and alleged attempts to fix games in the Bangladesh Premier League, exposing a murky underworld where prominent T20 tournaments are susceptible targets for those eager to manipulate the results of matches.”
Now at present we are also on the subject of the Sri Lanka Premier League Tournament which is around the corner.
The Times of India article talks of the bookies trying to infiltrate the Bangladesh Premier League, then with a background of the T-20 World Championship played in Sri Lanka, and a lot of emphasis placed on the T-20 cricket played in the island one could put a safe bet on the Indian bookies being interested in staking claim on the SLPL too. However, it should be stated that since the advent of the game of cricket, it is the IPL that has taken the game to its lowest ebb morally. Now along with the game of cricket what we associate are pimps, prostitutes, bookies, cheats, money launderers, hit men, sex maniacs and rave parties …. – may be the whole jargon of the underworld.
To the pure lover of the game, cricket is something more than a game. But, if you move the game below this point it may be the point of no return.
With the money generated through the IPL and other T-20 related matters we at this end do not think any cricket official or the ICC would take any step to do what they did with the Sharjah circus to T-20. Then what is the way out and survival for cricket as we once knew it.
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