TO the uninitiated spectator, any sport can seem boring. Cricket with its many subtleties of tactics and strategy, its arcane nomenclature and its formidable body of tradition and history is very often the most puzzling of games for the newcomer. It is this very complexity that has made this prince of sports disturbingly vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous gamblers, who are earning fortunes through match fixing. To achieve their ends, these individuals are bribing players and sometimes umpires to ensure that a certain event happens in a certain over. Thus a player might deliberately bowl a wide ball at a given moment, or the umpire will declare a perfectly good delivery to be wide. With most first-class games now being broadcast, it is hard for a match official to conceal a series of deliberate errors of judgement. However, it is a very different matter with players. Who is to say if a bowler deliberately overstepped to send down a “No Ball,” or if a running batsman's stumble was intended to slow him, so that he would be run out? Unlike football, where only a few goals are likely to be scored in a match, the final outcome of a cricket game is notoriously difficult to rig. Thus the hustlers have turned to trying to manipulate individual events within a match, so-called “spot-fixing”. There are three parts to this scandal. The first and most basic is the apparently huge number of people who are prepared to wager and very often lose their hard-earned money on cricket games. They have created the market into which the hucksters and shysters have moved. Without their foolish mania, there could be no such thing as match fixing. Then there are the bookmakers who promote this evil business, offering odds against certain events taking place in a game. This clique has only in the last 20 years begun to turn its attention to cricket with its lucrative new opportunities. Bookmakers are happy to take money off fools for anything, from sporting events, to the outcomes of elections, to the possibility of snowfall on a given day, or even hour. So without the suckers and the bookmakers who take advantage of their weakness, the scandal of rigging cricket matches could never have occurred. There is, however, the third part to this wicked exploitation, indeed, the most serious and depressing component: the players who are prepared to accept money to take part in “spot-fixing”. Three players in India's Premier League have been arrested on suspicion of this crime. All belong to the Rajasthan Royals, whose management say that they have zero tolerance for such cheating. Unfortunately, this is not the way it seems to be working more generally. Other cricketing countries including Pakistan and South Africa have had similar revelations and the players involved have sometimes only been suspended. This is not good enough. So great is the betrayal of a fine sport, of honest teammates and of millions of adoring fans that merely being kept out of the game for a period is a totally insufficient punishment. The answer has to be that these cheats must face a lifetime ban from the game. Should they be found guilty, they should never be allowed to take part in another professional match. If this means sacrificing an outstanding cricketer like the fast bowler S Sreesanth, one of the three players arrested this week, then it is the high price the game must pay to restore its honor.
