On October 5, the World Habitat Day, India and South Africa played a T20 cricket match which finished shamefully mainly because the Odisha crowd behaved like beasts. The South Africans kept pounding the overconfident Indians right from the beginning which did not go well with the victory-seeking unruly crowd. They hurled bottles and other garbage missiles to hurt players and officials in the field so violently that the authorities had to stop the game, have the spectators evacuated to finish the match on a very sad note.
Most shamefully, the stadium became terribly filthy with garbage missile litter on the ‘World Habitat Day’. The authorities too had forgotten the significance of cleanliness; so people were not fittingly frisked at the entry points.
It is not untrue that cricket has long since become a mad, unethical and dirty game on all scores. The original cricket, started in the 16th century, had become officially international in 1877. Twenty-two gentlemen, all in white, gathered and thirteen of them walked into the field with gay abandon as if they had the whole clock ticking at their will. Cricketers never displayed haste. Everything used to be easy, cool and casual. Football too was so easy with only a single ball to chase and sweat out on. Cricket was for long known as a lazy, elite class game. Until the advent of cable television, life was free of cricket in the South Asian region, except in rare urban locations. The game remained limited to test and county matches, mostly ending in bizarre draws. The Indian princes and the aristocrats played the game to please the colonial masters. Raja Ranjitsingji, the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar (now Jamnagar), fell in love and mastered cricket so well that history book contains him as the most entertainingly effortless player of the times. Ranji Trophy is the most prestigious cricket tournament of India. Newspapers carried cricket stories sparingly and occasional radio commentary kept cricket live.
The 50-over World Cup and the colour television came together to make cricket very popular in the early Eighties. Coincidentally by then, India, the underdog team, scooped the 1983 Prudential World Cup in England and the Indians began going mad from that day on. One-Day International cricket, broadcast live on television, turned a passion because of the grand excitement of ‘victory or defeat.’ Boring draws were gone forever.
The first historic thing the Indians did was to conclusively assassinate hockey. Then, they murdered football, volleyball and dozens of fitness games successively. The nature-linked age-old games were merrily forgotten. Skill-enhancing, no-cost games with ‘marbles’ ‘tops’ and ‘kites’ were loathed by kids as if they were meant for the untouchables only.
Cricket is a ruthless, unkind and unscrupulous game today. Interestingly, the first limited-overs match was played between England and Australia on January 5, 1971 in Melbourne after rains washed out the first three days of the third Test. It was just a circumstantial decision to finish the game happily. Australia had won by five wickets. Speed was appreciated and the One-Day International match was born. The Twenty-20 cricket followed as a faster sibling to ODI. No surprise that speed encourages entrepreneurship of the most dangerous kind. Investing for instant, hassle-free returns is gambling which is also an age-old entertainment activity. Betting on anything with a ‘victory-or-defeat’ finish attracts bettors, also called wagers.
Bookies are officially called ‘Turf Accountants’ who guide or bet on behalf of the stupid clients, called punters, because they are master analysers, determiners who are able to predict correct outcomes. They collect betting money from the losers to pay the winners. The whole process is executed on a mafia mode based on absolute trust and honesty. Bookies came into existence to simply post betting odds on ‘horse racing.’ Now in all fast and decisive games we witness betting. Cricket is the only game the Indian masses seem to have understood completely. People forget food, studies and paid-work to feast on cricket matches. An ordinary school kid can name the players of almost all the global teams but will keep fumbling for a fortnight if asked to name just five players of the current Indian hockey team.
Unfortunately, cricket today is the second most popular game in the world after football with a viewership of at least 1.3 billion. So bookies, fixers and punters are on the rise phenomenally. The first bookie on record had started business in 1780 at one Richard Tattersall’s horse auction. Two of the most respectable bookies in history are Fred Swindell and leviathan Davies who were active in the 1850s. Those days, betting was on outcome only, which is something like ‘match fixing’. But high-speed cricket bookies make more money from ‘spot fixing’ which is forecasting outcome after every set of ‘six overs’; sometimes every ball can be fixed too. There is evidence of ‘rupees in crores’ being put as bet by single individuals for the temptation of easy money is so amazingly big. The bookie identifies spot-fixers in the arena. Fail-safe players are secretly contacted to throw games, meaning underperform to lower the chances of victory. So, Sreesanth, who shoots the ball at 145 km per hour, was enticed to make easy money by underplaying and believably persuading teammates to do so for quick benefits. Bowlers fling a couple of wides or no-balls, master-blasters swing the bats in the air as if contact was impossible and so on, as per the bookie’s instructions. Match fixing secrets first surfaced in 2000 when the South African hero Hansie Cronje was caught and banned from cricket. He died in a plane crash in 2002. Mohammad Azharuddin, Manoj Prabhakar, Ajay Jadeja and many more have been defamed and banished for unethical practices to make quick money. Similarly, Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir of Pakistan were jailed in the UK for spot-fixing.
The faster the game, the bigger is the menace of fixing. Twenty-20 is the worst format. It is no true cricket. It churns out rogues who relegate the ‘cricket sanctity’ to the garbage yard. The BCCI is rumoured to be the richest sporting outfit in the world with a net worth of 2 billion dollars, followed by the Manchester United soccer concern with 1.87 billion and the Dallas Cowboys Baseball organisation worth 1.65 billion. The BCCI, established as a charitable organisation in 1928 replacing the Calcutta Cricket Club, amended its byelaws to become a profit-making outfit in 2006. It is now flush with profit earning from scores of sources including TV rights, ground sponsorship, travel, hotels, advertisement revenue and so many more. In 2013-14, it paid an income tax of nearly a Rs 1,000 crore under protest and expects to get a refund of Rs 973 crore.
No wonder, greedy politicians, business tycoons and high-level lobbyists manipulate to be part of the BCCI’s management. The IPl format rakes in the most and quickest dough for the BCCI. Former boss N Srinivasan, a cement baron, became a prime suspect for owning the Chennai Super Kings. His son-in-law Gurunath was an honorary management member of the CSK. He was arrested by the law enforcement. Srinivasan was unwilling to disappear from the scene. The public outcry got so loud that the Supreme Court had him dismissed.
But it is a fact that the IPl has conclusively marred the reputation of cricket. In the last IPl extravaganza, several franchisees played against each other in 3-hour matches across two months with blanket television coverage, cheer girls and celebrity owners including Mukesh Ambani and Shahrukh Khan pulling enormous crowds to the game events filled with endless “match and spot fixing” opportunities. A conservative media estimate puts the betting money at a staggering 44.3 billion dollars which can easily coax saints to commit sins. Wise cricket fans say, “Ban IPl or legalise betting to save cricket.”
The Odisha crowd has brought shame to the State. People should have behaved like hosts. No one can for sure say the Barabati fiasco was not fixed. Hopefully, it was not.