Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

First of all, I’d like you to bear with you in case I slip up. I’m so used to being on the other side of the microphone, asking questions. This is very much a new experience.

With that out of the way, I shall endeavour to explain to you why Wisden India will make a difference. To do that, I’ll ask you two questions.

First, why does cricket, or any other sport, matter? I’ve read many reasons. Some say sport is life in miniature. I don’t disagree. But if you think about it, so is cinema. The best definition I’ve come across is from the title of a book on football. The Faith of Our Fathers.

Think about it. How did we come to love this game? Speaking for myself, I saw my first Test match on TV when I was eight. My mother was the one who watched with me. It was the Lord’s Test of 1982 and though India lost, I was captivated by the flamboyance with which Kapil Dev batted and bowled.

The bulk of my cricket education, if one can call it that, came from my maternal grandfather. As a 19-year-old student in Madras as it was then, he watched Douglas Jardine’s England team take on CK Nayudu’s Indians. His love for the game never dimmed. At the age of 83, after he’d fractured his leg for the third time, he insisted on the television being shifted to his room so that he could watch India play in the Caribbean. I never saw him more upset than the night when India failed to chase 120 for victory in Barbados.

Each of us has such a story. And those stories matter because they’re the foundation of our faith.

My second question is this: What makes a sport? The players are at the centre of the sporting universe, because they’re the ones that make our dreams reality. The other indispensable element is the fan. Everyone else, whether it’s the administrators or the media, gets something out of sport. Those that invest financially usually get their rewards. But what of emotional investment?

I came across a couple of boys in Nagpur just before the India-South Africa World Cup game. They’d travelled 10 hours by train in an unreserved compartment to get there. They had no hotel room. They had freshened up and had a quick bite at the railway station and once the match was over, they had to head back to Mumbai the same way.

Passion is the most abused word in sport. But travel around India when cricket is played, and you can still feel it…people who get nothing tangible from the game, but give so much of themselves to it.

At Wisden India, we intend to listen to those fans because we believe they matter. When you support a Manchester United or a Barcelona, you get something back. In Barcelona’s case, the supporters are stakeholders in the club. Can we honestly say that Indian cricket looks after its fans, that the stadium experience is good enough for them to keep going back? It’s all too easy to sit in an air-conditioned press-box and criticise low turn-out. But what are we doing about it? We treat fans as caricatures, as over-emotional effigy-burners. But there are millions who are not. Wisden India will give them a space to express their views and concerns.

It’s not just fans either. We are prepared to work with everyone who has a stake in cricket. I emphasis the word ‘with’, because we will not work ‘for’ anyone. Independence has always been the hallmark of the Wisden imprint and that will not change when it comes to India. We will stand up for what we feel is right, but we will not push the agendas of those with vested interests. Wisden India will be true to the game, to its players and the fans whose support makes all of this possible. We believe that nothing else matters.

He watches a lot of domestic cricket and offered sane and measured answers to most questions. Until the IPL cropped up, in conjunction with India’s miserable performance on the tour of England. At that stage, he said: “Let’s blame the IPL for India winning the World Cup.” It was meant to be a sarcastic aside, but it had very sinister undertones on two levels.

Firstly, it was intellectually dishonest to associate a Twenty20 competition with success in the far more demanding 50-over game. Sachin Tendulkar, Jacques Kallis and several other great Test players have shown that it’s possible to adapt ‘down’ to the less challenging format. The reverse is certainly not true. You only have to look at the overhyped Kieron Pollard’s struggles outside of Twenty20 to see that.

Secondly, he neglected to mention that he was part of the management team of an IPL franchise. When better known names than him are guilty of similar conflicts of interest, it makes no sense to single him out, but it says much about how reasoned debate on charting a proper course for Indian cricket has been compromised by most stakeholders having vested interests.

The media is equally guilty for not jumping on these lies and half-truths often enough. Instead of ranting about what Nasser Hussain – who’s paid to offer a forthright opinion – thinks of India’s admittedly terrible fielding, they should be looking to expose statements like that made by the former selector.

Let’s leave aside sarcasm and emotion and focus on facts. The IPL is a Twenty20 event. How has it helped India in that format? Prior to the franchise system starting in 2008, India won the inaugural World Twenty20. Subsequent campaigns in 2009 and 2010 produced only embarrassing exits, with technical foibles exposed even in the format where it’s easiest to camouflage them.

Both those tournaments came on the back of a six-week-long IPL season, and fatigue played a big part in India’s underwhelming performances. That isn’t the view of a columnist with an axe to grind. Gary Kirsten said as much in 2009, at which point he was quietly told to zip it or else.

Such censorship of facts has spread its tentacles elsewhere too. For the last three seasons, Cricinfo’s writers have not been allowed to cover international cricket within India, or the IPL. The reasons given have varied, but usually involve an insincere line about the ‘official’ website needing to protect its interests.

That’s frankly ludicrous. Cricinfo’s live scorecard and commentary remain the go-to medium for almost anyone who’s stuck in an office. Most cricket fans either haven’t heard of the official website, or don’t care for it. Why would you read the sanitised “party line” when you can get better?

As someone who once worked for Cricinfo full time and still contributes the odd column, I’ve often been told that it doesn’t best express the interests of India and Indian cricket. That’s quite perplexing. Cricinfo is a global resource, the game’s answer to the BBC or CNN when it comes to comprehensive and usually objective coverage. Of course, individual writers will have their biases, but editorial policy has never been skewed in favour of one particular country.

India’s World Cup win was lauded, as it needed to be, and much of what’s rotten about the system keeps being pointed out. By denying such an outlet access, you’re more or less admitting that you have things to hide. It has served no purpose either. Cricinfo’s viewership continues to grow rapidly with greater Internet connectivity. The official sites remain third-rate and of little use, either for informed comment or statistical analysis.

Indian cricket has more going for it than it realises – the biggest player pool, limitless financial backing and a huge passionate fan base. All that’s missing is honest introspection. It’s hard to do that with your finger in several pies.

*This article was published in The Sunday Guardian on September 4, 2011.

Till then, the officer hadn’t even heard of fixing. At the time, India were in New Zealand for the Centenary Cup tournament, along with South Africa and Australia. “Kal ka match fixed hai, sir [Tomorrow's match is fixed],” the man said. Once it was proved that he had nothing to do with the killing, he was allowed to leave. Over the years, while business has flourished, he has continue to give the police information. Periodically, the cops arrest his men from various city suburbs. Each time, they go out on bail.

Over the 15 years, the one-time suspect and officer have got to know each other pretty well. “In India, the law doesn’t allow you to record telephone conversations unless it is a matter of national security,” says the officer. “That was the very reason we couldn’t record his conversation with a player back in 1995. That is why, despite several tip-offs, we don’t have any solid proof.”

According to him, we have seen merely the tip of the iceberg in the decade since Hansie Cronje was busted by the Delhi Police. “They [Delhi police] were tapping someone else’s phone number when Cronje’s call was intercepted,” he says. “They got it by chance.”
Despite Cronje, and the life ban handed down to Mohammad Azharuddin, who played 99 Tests for India, the law has not changed in the slighest. The Public Gambling Act under Section (3) of the Indian Penal Code suggests a ‘Penalty for owning or keeping, or having charge of a gaming-house’. According to it, if the owner/occupier, or any other person having the use or charge, care or management of any house, opens, keeps or uses the same as a ‘common gaming-house’ and knowingly or willfully permits the same to be occupied, used or kept by any other person as a ‘common gaming-house’, they shall be liable to a fine not exceeding two-hundred rupees, or to imprisonment for any term not exceeding three months, as defined in the Indian Penal Code (45 of 1860).

“Two hundred rupees fine or three months imprisonment?” sneers the officer. “Had I recorded that telephone conversation between the bookie and players, I would’ve been more seriously punished by the law than the two parties involved.”

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I first became aware of how deep-rooted the betting networks were a few months before Cronje’s dramatic fall from grace. I had just started my first job in cricket, and India were playing Pakistan and Australia in a tri-series at the turn of the millenium. My paraplegic landlady spent most of her days watching television. On game days, she would often call me for a chat, ending the conversation with a casual question about which team would win.

When the tournament ended, with Australia beating Pakistan, I was summoned for Sunday lunch. Having received no such invite in the six months that I had lived there, I was more than surprised to find an elaborate spread waiting. After the obligatory small talk, she said: “I have to thank you, beta [son]. You got five out of six matches right. I made 70,000 Rupees [around A$3000 at the time].”

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No matter who you ask, the fixing trail inevitably leads back to India, fertile ground as a result of betting being an illegal activity. Whether’s it’s London’s Oxford Street, Johannesburg, Karachi’s posh Clifton suburb, Borivli in Mumbai or the old market in Jaipur, you’ll find a bookie of Indian origin. Sanjeev Chawla, who runs a clothing boutique in Oxford Street, became well-known for his involvement in the Cronje case. In Johannesburg, the name most mentioned at the turn of the millennium was Hamid “Banjo” Cassim, closely linked to a few top Indian and South African players.

Karachi used to be a stronghold of the D Company, the organised crime syndicate headed by Dawood Ibrahim, once Mumbai’s most feared underworld figure. After his involvement in the Mumbai blasts of 1993 -257 were killed and more than a thousand injured – he has been one of India’s most wanted men. Having first shifted operations to the United Arab Emirates and then to Karachi, most fixing threads lead to him and the network he runs.

Dawood’s fascination with cricket was well-known long before he had to flee India. In the late ’80s, he was a fixture at matches in Sharjah. Several cricketers and quite a few of Bollywood’s A and B-list celebs could be glimpsed in his company. Five years ago, his daughter, Mahrukh, married Junaid Miandad, the son of Pakistan’s greatest-ever batsman. The wedding was hardly a secret, despite the fact that two years earlier, the US State Department had labelled him a “specially designated global terrorist” for alleged links with the Al-Qaeda.

In Australia, the name that most people remember when fixing comes up is Mukesh Gupta alias MK alias John, who tried to offer Shane Warne and Mark Waugh money for seemingly innocuous information. When Mazhar Majeed, the Pakistani player-agent, was implicated in the News of the World’s sting operation, he too hinted at links with Indian bookmakers.

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At the heart of Delhi’s Connaught Place is a popular pub frequented by the young and trendy. It has a good menu, plays some eclectic music and also provides very good odds for cricket matches. Those in the know say that the joint never did better business than during the time when the Indian Cricket League (ICL) was played. Sponsored by the Zee network, which has its own sports channel, the ICL came into being a few months before the Indian Premier League transformed the Twenty20 world. A miffed Indian cricket board used its clout to cajole and bully the others into labelling it a “rebel” league and starved of legitimacy and prevented from playing at the game’s marquee venues, it soon withered away.

But in the time that it was in operation, it made the news for a lot of wrong reasons. Rumours of match-fixing were never far away, but when two players – Dinesh Mongia and Chris Cairns – were sacked in early 2009, the whispers grew ever louder. Covering one of the games played by the Chandigarh Lions, a reporter wrote: “It was a strange match. The Mumbai Champs ambled leisurely to 135 and Chandigarh threatened to throw away the game to Nathan Astle’s gentle medium-pace before the aggressive Sarabjit guided them home through the tense final overs. Even the experienced Dinesh Mongia lost the plot, lofting Astle straight to long-off. Elliott too joined the suicide party, holing out to deep point, leaving Chandigarh struggling at 54 for 4. Chris Cairns too was guilty of doing the same.”

When the reporter subsequently spoke to a player, he was told: “It was bizarre. We were shocked at a few decisions they (Chandigarh) were taking while setting the field. The point was removed, a second slip was added; there was a long leg but no cover. It seemed like neither team was interested in winning the game.”
Not long ago, a Pakistani newspaper reported how the ICL had stopped payments to two cricketers after suspected involvement in fixing. Speaking to the Times of India, a player said: “Not just those two players, the entire team was involved. The best-of-three final was a joke, it was all fixed.”

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India’s gambling craze is fuelled by it being illegal. Except for the racetrack, any sort of betting on sport is banned. The self-styled custodians of culture consider it anathema to the Indian way of life. Anyone who’s seen millions of Rupees change hands during the Hindu festival of Diwali when games of Teen Pathi [similar to three-card brag] are the norm rather than an exception will tell you just how hypocritical that is.

Lately, the judiciary has begun to realise the futility of a ban. A trial court in Delhi recently suggested that betting in cricket and other sports should be legalised. In their view, unaccounted money generated through the illegal activity is being used to fund terror and drug trafficking. The court observed that making betting legal would also generate revenue, as with  the lottery business. It could also stop widespread money-laundering.

An average of 118 million pounds was staked on each IPL game last season, according to a Times of India article published on April 28. According to their sources, the total turnover was $11 billion. The same report alleged that the final, played three days earlier, was fixed. The Mumbai Indians, the table-toppers and favourites, were beaten by the Chennai Super Kings. Bookies stopped taking bets on a Chennai win midway through the first innings. A police source told the paper: “If Rajesh Jaipur and his brother Rakesh are made to undergo the narco [analysis] test, then a huge betting racket in IPL matches and the role of the bigwigs will be exposed.”

Where does all this money come from? Post economic liberalisation in the early 1990s, enormous fortunes have been made in small-town India. Those who run small-scale businesses or own farms in the region around a city like Nagpur, for example, are worth millions. Betting for them is a way of passing the time. They may not prop up the bar in a pub, smoke or indulge in any off-fairway pursuits, but it’s not uncommon for two men to stand by the side of the highway and have a wager on what colour the next car will be.

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That, though, is the harmless side of fixing. The sinister face of it was on view recently when the family of Zulqarnain Haider, the Pakistan wicketkeeper who abandoned a tour in Dubai and fled to London after being allegedly threatened by bookies, claimed that they too had been intimidated. “Zulqarnain’s wife got three calls today, two from an unknown number and one from a number in Greece, in which the caller, speaking in Urdu, threatened her of dire consequences if Zulqarnain said anything about anyone,” said Aqeel Haider, one of his brothers. According to Aqeel, the calls came soon after after Zulqarnain had updated his Facebook page with a message saying he would blow the whistle on ” those who have taken money”. “All these people who are saying negative things about me, they should wait for five more days, then I will show them my background and status,” he had written. “After five days I will show them their background and place, and also those who don’t take money and those who have taken money.”

If the story is true, and there’s no reason not to believe it, Zulqarnain and his family wouldn’t be the first to receive threats. When Malik Mohammad Qayyum, a Pakistani judge, was carrying out his inquiry into match-fixing between 1998 and 2000, he asked the Lahore police for details of a case against two bookies, Raja and Jojo, who had been caught after abducting Wasim Akram’s father.

In 2000, Akram spoke to The Daily Mirror about his ordeal. “My brother called to say my father had suffered a heart attack and the reason behind it, I believe, was that he had been kidnapped for a day. Those people who kidnapped him thought that, you know, a match was fixed even though someone else was captaining the side at the time. They held him captive for a day and they were hitting him all over for a day – and he is 65 years old.”

When Basit Ali and Rashif Latif testified before Qayyum, they spoke of how they had walked into Salim Malik’s room during a 1995 tour and seen him in the company of Muhammad Hanif Kodvavi, also known as Hanif Cadbury, Pakistan’s best-known bookie. Hia tale best illustrates just how ruthless the gambling syndicates can be.

It’s no coincidence that Dawood is part of that story too. Kodvavi fled to South Africa in the late ’90s after a dispute with Dawood over money lost in Sharjah matches. A sum of 800 million Rupees was mentioned. But the southern cape was hardly a safe haven. Haji Ibrahim Bholoo, once affiliated with the Pakistan People’s Party, had arrived there in the ’90s and quickly become involved in drug-running. He was also Dawood’s man there. Kodvavi was shot 67 times and his body then mutilated, according to a report in the Sunday Times (London). Bizarrely, police in Johannesburg denied any knowledge of the murder.

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So, how long have the world’s cricket boards kept their heads buried in the sand? The trail goes back a long time.  In 1993, a Mumbai-based enthusiast presented the Indian team with Rs 2.5 million in cash after they swept a three-Test series against England. Two months later, the man was arrested under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities [Prevention] Act (TADA).

In his testimony before the King Commission in 2000, Ali Bacher, the country’s cricket supremo, spoke of how none of the ICC’s member countries had objected when Sir Clyde Walcott, then president, and David Richards, the CEO, had decided to keep the Warne-Waugh affair under wraps. Bacher himself had been alerted to fixing as early as 1995, but his dismal defence was merely to state: “There’s a viewpoint in the ICC that it should have been brought to the attention of all the administrators at that time.”

During the World Cup of 1999, Majid Khan, the Pakistani legend, told Bacher that two of the the games had been fixed. Again, South African cricket’s main man kept mum, breaking his silence only when his blue-eyed boy was caught on tape in India.

One of those Bacher subsequently spoke about before the commission was Mr R, allegedly responsible for fixing the England-South Africa Test at Headingley in 1998 [where Allan Donald bowled that ferocious spell to Michael Atherton] and the India-Pakistan match at the 1999 World Cup. Indian police and bookies were pretty certain that Mr R was Ratan Mehta, who ran an upmarket restaurant in Delhi. According to the India Today magazine, Mehta spent the days before the game – played in the backdrop of the Kargil conflict between the two nations – making his arrangements. On the eve of the game, at a nightclub called China White, he announced to an associate that he knew the batting order and the scores at which wickets would fall.

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With Dawood a marked man, the nerve-centre of operations has shifted from Mumbai in the past decade. A few months ago, a journalist I know went to visit a bookie in Jabalpur, a small town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The story he published offered some fascinating insight into how the trade flourishes.

The bookie, Ramesh Bhai, claimed to make 100 Billion Rupees a year. “You have to understand one thing, we are not underworld,” he said. “Yes what we do is illegal but tomorrow if you’re my client and you refuse to pay me, I’m not going to be coming after you with guns and knives. I’ll simply never deal with you again. But if you do that while dealing with Dawood’s men, you’re dead. Whether they reclaim their money from you or not.
“Similarly, it is not we who fix matches. Believe me when I say this: A bookmaker like me does not need to fix anything. I just run this business with 10-12 boys who just sit with two laptops and five phones and my work is done. Without any underhand dealing, after paying the police their per-match cut, after paying the boys and everybody else, I still take home easily around Rs 200,000 to 300,000 a day depending on the match. Then why do I need to fix anything?”

Mumbai and Delhi have a long history of cricket betting, but in recent times they have been overshadowed by Jaipur, Hyderabad and Nagpur. Rakesh and Rajesh, two brothers who run India’s biggest network out of Jaipur, simply follow the odds quoted by the likes of Betfair and Ladbrokes. In Nagpur, Rammu Agarwal is the top man, while Hyderabad has Murad Bhai, who has the dubious distinction of “looking after Australia”.

According to Ramesh Bhai, what the News of the World exposed wasn’t fixing at all. “It was the bookie trying to present his case by way of confirming on television that he could dictate their performance,” he said. “He was only trying to lure in a customer and tell him that we can make a particular cricketer do a particular thing. Of course no-balls are fixed and so are wides. My boys take bets on it. It’s big money. Money on a win or loss is different. Little things add colour.”

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Corruption on the subcontinent is also aided by the fact that player agency is completely unregulated. The India board doesn’t recognise FICA, the international players’ association, and their attitude to agents is similarly blase. In India, most of the big names are on the books of talent-management companies, but not all of them have had their antecedents examined thoroughly. Across the border in Pakistan, the situation is chaotic, with players often latching on to an agent in whichever country they tour in a bid to maximise income. Mohammad Asif, for instance, had one agent in Salman Ahmed, but he also dealt with Majeed while in the UK.

In a recent interview with an Indian newspaper, Ahmed suggested that the rot extended to officials. “When the Pakistan team manager [Yawar Saeed] landed in London at the start of the tour, the first thing he did was order for a chauffeur-driven Mercedes to travel across town,” he said. “How much should that cost in Central London? A 1000 pounds? That’s the kind of money they spend in a day. Where’s that kind of money coming from?’’

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My second tour as a correspondent took me to Sharjah in October 2000, a few months after Cronjegate had shaken a nation’s faith in the game. It was the last time that India would play in the emirate, with the Central Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry into fixing suggesting that off-shore venues represented a far greater risk. At one of several parties thrown by various sheikhs, the teams – Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe were the others – had arrived, smartly dressed in their blazers. I gravitated to a group of people I knew. Among them was an India international who had been playing for a couple of years. Within a minute or two, an “agent” had come and tapped him on the shoulder. Though there were at least four of us listening on, he told the player: “Come on, I’ve got two Russian girls up at the apartment.”

The player first went pale and then spluttered: “But I’m in my India colours. I can’t come out looking like this.” The response flattened us all. “Don’t worry,” said the agent. “I’ve got a change of clothes for you in the car.” They left five minutes later.

I don’t know if that player ever fixed matches, but I do know that everyone from the KGB downwards has used “honey traps” to make people malleable. With agents like that, see-no-evil-hear-no-evil administrators like Walcott and Bacher, and organised crime-syndicates forever lurking in the background, we can only wonder if what we see is sport or charade.

* This article first appeared in the January edition of Inside Sport in Australia.

Comrie doesn’t go back to the area as much as he’d like these days. When he does, it’s often for the wrong reasons. “A lot of my old friends have been killed in the area,” he tells you. “Earlier today, I was watching a football game on TV, and you could see a helicopter circling overhead. There’s a fear of violence, and that violence is a fact of life in Trenchtown now. Growing up, it was never like that. Boys’ Town was one of the most successful institutions in the Caribbean, and dare I say it, the most unique in the world.”

Father Hugh Sherlock, who founded the club, died in 1998, and part of the neighbourhood’s soul went with him. For cricket aficionados, it’s enough to know that Boys’ Town was Worrell’s last club. After Collie’s tragic death in a car crash in England in 1959, Worrell, a Barbados native who had moved to Jamaica, came to Boys’ Town to play as a way of honouring the memory of his departed colleague. Boys’ Town won the Cup for the first time in 1960, and Comrie says with a grin: “It was also because we started getting a fair deal from the umpires.”

Comrie’s own cricket career ended when he went to England to study in the early 1960s, but he put off his departure by a year just so that he could play alongside Worrell. “You just played beyond yourself,” he tells you. “When he first promoted me from the senior side, I didn’t really want it because I would have been captain of the junior team. And in the first five games, I didn’t get to bat or bowl because we were so strong.

“The first time I batted was at No.10. Sir Frank gave me his bat and gloves. I felt such an energy then that I could have batted for 10 days. I made the second-highest score and we won the game. The next match we played, he gave me his pads. Whenever I’d look at the pavilion, he’d be watching. It gave you strength. He was the first to stand up and cheer if you played a good shot. You couldn’t get out. It was his last match before leaving for Australia, and he let me keep his bat.”

What was it like playing alongside someone who was so much more than just a cricketer? “I sometimes want to think it was a dream,” says Comrie, “to play with him, to sit beside him. He was a remarkable human being.”

As special as Worrell was, it’s Collie that has been the abiding obsession. “He was the living embodiment of Christ,” he tells you, though a Muslim himself. I look away embarrassed as I see the glint of a tear in his eye. “He was very humble, and yet attracted attention wherever he went. He reached out to people. Right from the time I first watched him, I used to keep a scrapbook. And each time Collie came back from tours, he’d bring me clippings.”

He shows me some, from a huge file that he has carried with him. Some of the clippings are yellow with age, and you’re half afraid to even touch them. Some of the articles deal with Trenchtown and its problems, but the rest are all about Collie and what West Indies cricket lost forever when a car driven by Sir Garfield Sobers crashed in Staffordshire in 1959.

It dismays Comrie that “Ninety per cent of Jamaicans no longer know about him”. “The road named after him, Collie Smith Drive, is known for its shooting and fighting and death. It leads straight to a cemetery. What happens on that road has no connection whatsoever to the man he was.”

The same Trenchtown that gave the world Collie Smith, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and many others is now a no-go zone. “Bob Marley wrote five songs about Trenchtown,” Comrie tells you with a smile. “He just put music to the way people talked there. When he sang:Then we would cook cornmeal porridge, Of which I’ll share with you; My feet is my only carriage, So I’ve got to push on through, he was talking about our lives.

“And there was Jimmy Tucker [the tenor]. Listening to him was like going to the Metropolitan opera. He was singing in languages he didn’t even know. Even now, when I listen to him, I can close my eyes and picture Trenchtown as it was 50 years ago.”

It was a different world then.

* This was originally written as part of a travel diary for Cricinfo.

It’s one of those little nuggets of trivia now that India’s legendary spin quartet played only one Test together, at Edgbaston in 1967. They took 18 wickets and kept England under 300 in both innings, but traditional frailties with the bat away from home scuppered any chance of victory. Thereafter, it was always a case of musical chairs, with S Venkataraghavan or Erapalli Prasanna usually missing out.

Leaving aside the spin duo of Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh, who now occupy two of the top three places in India’s all-time wicket-takers’ list, most of the epochal victories in recent times have been scripted by the pace trio of Zaheer Khan, Ishant Sharma and Sreesanth. Well, here’s another trivia test for you. How many times have all three played together in a Test match?

Zaheer and Sreesanth combined to devastating effect at the Wanderers in 2006, while Ishant came into his own on the tour of Australia in 2008. After an injury blighted couple of seasons, Sreesanth returned to telling effect at Kanpur against Sri Lanka last year. But with India usually employing a two pace-two spin combination for home Tests and one or the other on the mend from some injury, they have only shared the Test stage once, at Chittagong earlier this year where they combined for 12 wickets.

Given that the back-up has either regressed to the extent that they’re not even good enough to be considered for warm-up games – RP Singh and Irfan Pathan – or are far too callow to be risked against the world’s best sides – Jaidev Unadkat and Abhimanyu Mithun – it goes without saying that managing the pace stable is India’s biggest headache over the next few months.

Zaheer has just returned from injury, and looked well off the pace in the Mumbai Indians’ first game in South Africa. Sreesanth too has just returned from the physio’s couch, and will get his only chance to stake a claim in a warm-up game against Ricky Ponting’s Australians. For the moment, Ishant, far from impressive on the recent tour of Sri Lanka, looks the only certain starter for the Mohali Test that starts on October 1.

Given the itineraries that are choc-a-bloc with games we could do without, injury crises are hardly an Indian problem. England are already reconciled to the fact that neither Andrew Flintoff nor Simon Jones will play a Test again, while Australia have seen both Peter Siddle and Ben Hilfenhaus struck down after promising starts. For West Indies, Jerome Taylor struggles to stay fit, while New Zealand have waved goodbye to Shane Bond and possibly Jacob Oram.

In order to manage the workload effectively, the team management needs to have power that borders on the dictatorial. Stuart Broad didn’t play the home Tests against Bangladesh. Instead, he was on a strength-and-conditioning programme. Steven Finn has been nursed through the home season with one eye clearly on the Ashes. Once you recognise who your prime assets are, you mothball them from time to time to ensure that they’re around for the biggest challenges.

India’s selectors and coach don’t have that luxury. In addition to captaining in all three forms of the game, MS Dhoni’s grarled fingers have to cope with Indian Premier League and Champions League duty for the Chennai Super Kings. The Board President’s XI side to play the Australians could start a man short if two IPL teams make the final in South Africa. The board’s priorities, like those of the players, have clearly changed, but there will be many an angry question to answer if both the coveted No.1 ranking and dreams of World Cup glory are lost as a result of a schedule that has been allowed to spread unchecked like a tangle of weeds.

*This article was first published in The Sunday Guardian on September 12.

These are not the thoughts of the 18-year-old Mohammad Amir, who played his part in Pakistan’s World Twenty20 triumph last year. Those words came from Robin Uthappa, now 24, in an interview with Cricinfo. With Amir now suspended and likely to face a ban from all forms of cricket, we should focus on what Uthappa says. Make no mistake, Indian or Pakistani, every young player who comes into the bubble is vulnerable.

In Amir’s case, especially so. When Pepsi made a commercial in Pakistan earlier this year, he was one of those they signed on, along with Call, the music group, and Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi, the tennis player who partners India’s Rohan Bopanna. The ad was about striving hard to be successful, no matter what your background, and Amir, who comes from the nondescript village of Changa Bangyal in Punjab’s Gujjar Khan district, exemplified that.

His heroics in England last summer – he took the crucial wicket of Tillakaratne Dilshan in the final at Lord’s – prompted spontaneous celebrations back home, with folk trekking from neighbouring villages to his family home. In the true traditions of Pakistani hospitality, they made sure that everyone got tea and rotis.

After his 11 wickets helped square the series against Australia, his proud brother-in-law spoke of how far Amir had come. “He grew up playing in these very fields,” he said. “He hasn’t reached the team through a parchi [lottery] system, the kid has talent. I would like to request the former cricketers to please not raise their voices or hoot against these kids. The poor things play under pressure.”

Those words carry extra resonance now. What kind of pressure was Amir under when he bowled those two blatantly obvious no-balls at Lord’s? Was there just financial incentive, or had the gangsters and scamsters who once kidnapped Wasim Akram’s father got to him as well? How well-placed are we to judge a boy who didn’t even become eligible to vote till a few months ago?

The International Cricket Council says that Amir, like every other player, was briefed about corruption and told what to do in the event of an approach. That’s fine in theory, but this is Pakistan cricket you’re talking about. The patron-in-chief, the president, isn’t referred to as Mr 10 Percent for nothing. Ijaz Butt, who heads the board, is the brother-in-law of the defence minister. There are at least three players who owe their place in the side to connections they have with board officials or politicians. When Malcolm Speed, the former ICC chief executive, called Butt a “buffoon” and labelled Pakistan cricket a “basket case”, it ruffled feathers, but he was merely vocalising what a great number, within and outside Pakistan, feel.

Anti-apartheid acitvists pressed for a sporting boycott of South Africa on the grounds that there could be no normal sport in an abnormal society. And while a ban on Pakistan cricket is no solution, it’s imperative that we don’t view Amir’s case through a normal lens.

Teenagers make mistakes, big and small. They’re easily led astray, especially by those they look up to. In a culture where even the team’s seniors are only ever looking out for themselves, what kind of guidance would he have got? How insecure was he as a result of the stress fractures he suffered on an Under-19 tour of England? We will know the answers to these questions only if Amir comes clean about what happened.

If Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif are found guilty of spot-fixing, they should never be allowed to play the sport again, not even in the street. Asif is the most accomplished bowler in the world, but his skills have gone hand-in-hand with sheer stupidity that has made him a repeat offender. Amir too must be banned if found guilty. But it must not be a life sentence. A rehabilitated Amir would not only be the finest quick bowler we’ve seen in a generation – that is immaterial – he would also be a powerful voice against corruption in the game.

If we banish him now, the game loses a hugely promising talent and a young man loses his opportunity to redeem himself. Every human being, especially one who’s just 18, deserves that chance.

* THis article appeared in the Sunday Guardian on September 5.
** In Matthew Engel’s moving tribute to Colin Milburn, he writes: “Milburn might not have been the greatest cricketer of his generation, but he was, beyond question, the cricketer we could least afford to lose. And we lost him.” I keep thinking of those words when I see footage of Amir walking in and out of police stations.

Last week, a TV channel released emails that suggested the 2009 IPL auction had been fixed so that the Super Kings could sign Andrew Flintoff, who then turned out to be the biggest waste of money in the fledging league’s history. Modi later told Cricinfo that Srinivasan and the Super Kings “pressurised the [IPL] operating team”. When he was asked if other successful bids were less than transparent, he replied: “Yes, to my knowledge”.

The BCCI has already come out in support of its current blue-eyed boy. “I can produce papers which prove that the charges levelled by Mr Modi against Mr Srinivasan are blatant lies,” said Shashank Manohar, the board president, who is now likely to authorise legal action against Modi.

This is the season for sporting scandals in India. The IPL fiasco came first, though compared to the daylight robbery that is the Commonwealth Games, that seems chump change. But for a competition that is only three seasons old, this latest allegation is a real blow. When the commissioner [suspended for now] of the league admits to such gross malpractice, what credibility does the competition have? Who won’t look at future auctions and wonder if they are above board?

More importantly, can the BCCI afford a top official whose involvement with one team isn’t even a secret? Once upon a time, players from other Australian states used to say that the baggy green national cap came free with the New South Wales’ blue one. Similarly, there are embittered whispers doing the rounds now that all you need to do to get an India or India A call-up is wear the Super Kings’ canary yellow. It doesn’t help when the chief selector is a brand ambassador for the same IPL side.

“The BCCI has always maintained that the auction was free and fair, and any suggestion of collusion between board members to divvy up top players such as Flintoff would be a hammer blow to the tournament’s already tarnished reputation.” wrote David Hopps in The Guardian. It’s become the default position to attribute any criticism of India or its cricket board to jealousy and resentment of its riches. That’s as pathetic as the notions of superiority that prop up right-wing conservatives in the US.

The IPL has the financial resources and the power to attract most players, but like Caesar’s wife, it must be seen to be above board. Without that, the hype and hoopla can only last so long. Not everyone wants the IPL to fail, but there are many all around the world who would like it to be run better. Why not have professional management, with men and women whose neutrality are not in question? Surely, the owners who have sunk small fortunes into each franchise would prefer it too.

India’s new generation of players has been the target of much criticism over the past month. Wasim Akram called them soft, others have questioned their commitment and ability to see beyond short-term riches. But like anyone else, they need good role models. When those governing them or laying down the rules break them so flagrantly, what can we expect? The rot starts at the top, not with some callow 20-year-old.

*This article appeared in The Sunday Guardian on August 29, 2010.

When he leaned in closer, Best looked up and told the man to **** off. “Make me,” he snarled. Best, who had never shied away from a challenge on the field, stood up and socked him one flush on the jaw. The man didn’t flinch. “That the best you can do then?” he sneered. “Oh, alright then. Get me another half!” said Best.

I was reminded of that anecdote when I read the non-story about the eight Indian cricketers inside Tequila Joe’s in St. Lucia. Show-cause notices were issued when they returned to India, despite the fact that all they had done was back up a mate subjected to vile abuse by fans who thought that paying their way to the Caribbean gave them some sort of entitlement to treat the players how they wished. Sure, Ravindra Jadeja had a bad tournament. But techies write rubbish code sometimes. Journalists deliver poor articles. No one takes a pop at us in a pub because of it.

It gets tiresome to hear that this comes with the territory when you’re an Indian cricketer. Are we actually condoning idiots pelting players’ houses when they lose, or drunken morons practising their upper-cuts in bars and pubs? Apparently, the board was unhappy that a couple of the players were “drunk” [probably had a couple of drinks]. Why? The tournament was over. They were heading home. Since when was it a crime for someone off duty to head out, and that too in a place like the Caribbean?

A couple of weeks ago, I heard one of the organisers of the now-infamous IPL parties saying that they provided an opportunity for the fans to get closer to the ‘stars’. Why would you do that, especially in a country like India where the concept of personal space is non-existent?

I recall sitting in the departure lounge at Nagpur Airport, the day after Australia had annihilated India to end 35 years of pain on Indian soil [October 2004]. It was just a few months after Virender Sehwag got married, and he was chatting to his wife. A ‘fan’ found his way to where they were sitting, put his arms around both seats and leaned his head in so that he was literally kissing distance from both husband and wife. His friend snapped away happily. Sehwag looked appalled, but said nothing, probably fearing “Arrogant Indian star” headlines in the next day’s tabloids. Not once had our friend asked him or his wife permission to take a picture. An Indian cricketer. Public property. Has no rights.

I asked Suresh Raina, who will lead the team to Zimbabwe, how much the excessive criticism affects him when the team loses. His expression was halfway between a rueful smile and a grimace. After all, these are players who care only about the next ad campaign, and not about playing for their country. “You can’t think about such things,” he said finally. “Whatever endorsements or shoots I do, it’s only because I score runs for the team. If that stops, they will too.”

As Julia Baird wrote in Newsweek in the aftermath of the Tiger Woods scandal: ‘Why do we even pretend that sports-people are models of propriety? Or rather why do we need them to be? They are physically gifted, driven, and disciplined. That’s what you need to excel at sport. Not moral strength, courage, decency, or fidelity. These virtues are admirable, but are a bonus: they should not be an expectation. Yet we continue to project an irrational desire for the physically perfect to be spiritually strong.’

In India, we are world leaders at that sort of hypocrisy. The board, with several individuals of decidedly dubious moral quality, tends to lead the way. It’s resulted in the gulf between players and fans, the two most important stakeholders in any sport, growing wider by the day. And as long as we don’t respect personal space, that’s perhaps just as well.

*This appeared The Sunday Guardian on May 23.

The English Premier League, like its Indian cricket equivalent, is a harsh environment to grow up in. Pots of money, a fancy car a week if you feel like it, an endless stream of faux-celebrity girlfriends and groupies. Parasitic agents and hangers-on. But for every idiot like Bowyer who hits the skids, there are others like Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs, exemplary professionals who have lasted nearly as long as Tendulkar at the top.

This week, we’ve heard a lot of rubbish about IPL nights and parties and the effects on the Indian national team. Why are we so eager for excuses? When will we accept that each individual has to take responsibility for his actions? Several of the Australians played in the IPL, including the hard-hitting opening duo of Shane Watson and David Warner and Dirk Nannes, the top wicket-taker in the Caribbean. England’s campaign has been built around runs from Kevin Pietersen and Eoin Morgan, both of whom were part of the Royal Challengers squad.

Are you telling me that Australians don’t party? Some of their guys could drink the Indians under a table five times over, but once they cross the white line on to the field, professionalism takes over. Warner is squat enough to be a rugby prop, but he covers the outfield with astonishing fleetness of foot and takes some stunning catches. The fast bowlers, Nannes, Shaun Tait and Mitchell Johnson are all big men, but with athletic rather than stevedore physiques.

And then there’s Michael Hussey. At 35, he’s five years older than Yuvraj Singh, and from a different generation to Rohit Sharma. In the heat and humidity of St. Lucia, he scampered between the wickets like a teenager, gathering his breath only briefly before walloping the six sixes that transformed the semi-final. Hussey was given the baggy green cap at 30, after more than 15,000 first-class runs. Nothing came easily to him.

“The thing about the Australian team is that it’s so tough to get into that you want to perform as well as you possibly can, because you know there are people playing first-class cricket that are desperate to get an opportunity,” he said when I interviewed him in 2008. “You’d never let up on the opposition or cruise through. You don’t want to give someone else the chance to take your place.”

And while he accepted the inevitability of the Twenty20 explosion, he had no doubts as to how players should look to develop. “I’ll be doing everything in my power to pass on to the next generation how important it is to play Test cricket and wear that baggy green cap with pride. I think it’s important that we continue to develop a culture where you have to work very hard – score a lot of runs, take a lot of wickets – to get your opportunity to play for Australia. You’ll never take it for granted then.”

Pietersen went off to England as an unknown, and did his time at Nottinghamshire and Hampshire before breaking through in 2005. Both men, who could dictate the course of today’s final, have a voracious appetite for runs, driven as they are by what they perceive as time lost. How often do we see that kind of desire and commitment from the younger generation of Indian cricketers, especially those that have already banked millions as a result of the IPL?

Bowyer was in his prime around the time Yuvraj made such an impact on debut in Kenya. Back then, Yuvraj was not just the batsman for the future, but also as good a fielder as India had seen. These days, he stands at mid-on, usually reserved for bowlers with one foot in the knacker’s yard, doing belly-flops and watching the ball pass him by. The hunger for success that could have made him a Hussey or a Pietersen has been replaced by appetites of another kind.

* This article was published in The Sunday Guardian on May 16.

Test cricket, with its drawn-out plots and Hitchcockian twists, is an anachronism in the 21st century, and you half-suspect that there are those in the game’s administration that wouldn’t mind seeing it go the way of the T Rex. After all, it’s one-day cricket, the Govinda movie with popcorn, and Twenty20, the five-minute cartoon, that have the cash registers going ker-ching. Test cricket, though, is a resilient beast and from time to time, it throws up matches that captivate a nation and bring in a whole new breed of fan.

English cricket is ineffably richer for the Ashes series of 2005, five matches where Dame Fortune didn’t seem to know which team to favour. From Ricky Ponting’s bloodied cheek at Lord’s to Kevin Pietersen’s dashing final-day century at The Oval, a generation that had never seen English Ashes success lapped it up.

Sadly, in India, where respect for elders is a way of life, the most venerable form of the game has often been given short shrift. Every other major Test-playing nation has its traditional matches, the ones that people plan their holidays around. Whether it’s Boxing Day at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the New Year’s Tests at the Sydney Cricket Ground or Newlands, or Lord’s in summer, these occasions have become part of the social fabric. Whatever happened to the Pongal Test in Chennai? Why not play at the Eden Gardens during Holi, or in Mumbai during Diwali?

Those that run the game won’t give you any answers. After all, board politics meant that Kolkata didn’t host a Test in 2008 or ’09, while games were played at venues like Nagpur and Mohali in front of largely empty stands. Ask the players where they’d rather play and they’ll tell you. “Eden has always been special,” says Harbhajan Singh, one of the heroes of the innings win that kept India at the top of the Test tree. “I have not heard this kind of noise anywhere in India. In Test matches, we don’t always get crowds but at Eden, you do for the whole five days. It’s fantastic.”

The game was too, with India resurrecting its hopes after a dire first two sessions that saw South Africa canter to 218 for 1. The famed Eden roar, that helped bring Steve Waugh’s Australia to its knees back in 2001, then came into play as the middle order fell apart. India never looked back, with Virender Sehwag, Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman and MS Dhoni all scoring contrasting centuries as a massive lead was built. Then, without Zaheer Khan, the pace talisman had picked up a thigh strain, and in spite of the magnificent Hashim Amla – who batted 499 minutes for his unbeaten 123 – the patched-up attack bowled India to victory.

When Harbhajan trapped Morne Morkel leg-before with only nine balls left to be bowled, there was bedlam in the stands. Reports of Test cricket’s imminent demise had clearly been exaggerated. Keeping it healthy in the age of popcorn cricket may not be impossible after all.

*This was the latest column for the Sunday Guardian, a new newspaper published out of Delhi.