Play It Straight
A week after a British tabloid reported the alleged collusion of some Pakistani cricketers with a London-based bookie in spot-fixing, there's more proof in the public domain regarding betting, which should make cricket lovers worried. Yasir Hameed, a colleague of the three tainted Pakistani cricketers, reportedly said the players have been doing [...]
Cricket’s Crisis Of Conscience
World cricket is at a crossroads. While it tries to come to terms with the latest round of events that have shamed the global cricket fraternity, it is also finding it difficult to ignore the compulsions of power politics that have always influenced decision-making in cricketing boardrooms across the world for decades. The latest victim of [...]
Overcast
The International Cricket Council has taken a rather hands-off approach to the current spot-fixing scandal. In first comments, ICC President Sharad Pawar appeared to advise patience till the police in England completed their investigation into the Lord’s Test. The allegation, based on an undercover operation by a London newspaper, is that [...]
Throwing it all away
The allegations of ‘spot-fixing' in the fourth cricket Test between England and Pakistan — a decade after Hansie Cronje's confessions shattered the game's credibility — are both an eerie reminder of the dark days and an explicit threat to the sport's future. They show that the tumour of match-fixing, which erodes the fan's faith, hasn't been [...]
Cricket In Crisis
The allegations that Pakistani players, including their captain Salman Butt, collaborated with a betting racket during the England-Pakistan Test series could have a debilitating impact on the game. The immediate fallout will be felt in Pakistan, a country that has produced some of the game's finest players. Cricket in that country has been in [...]
Without Afridi?
Even by Pakistan cricket’s stratospheric standards of unpredictability, there was something reckless in the disciplinary action announced on Wednesday. After the disastrous tour of Australia, something had to give. It did, and how. In essence, the Pakistan Cricket Board has deprived itself of its most talented players. While players could yet [...]
IPL’s over-the-top dollars
Mammon, it seems, is now the official lord and God of cricket. Or at least this franchisee, premier league form of it, where obscene sums of money fuel the giddy exercises of building team brands, peddling merchandise and inventing rivalries where one couldn’t see any. And take the frenetic slam-bang sixes and fours of Twenty20, and phrases [...]
Kanika Datta: Moral hazard comes to football finance
Goldman Sachs’ chief economist Jim O’Neill is an unlikely name to figure in discussions among football’s TV pundits and bloggers. But that’s just where you can spot his name these days. That’s because he’s at the centre of a hostile takeover attempt on Manchester United, one of the world’s richest and most successful football [...]
Karel De Gucht: Bowled over by trade
In my first official visit to India as European trade commissioner, I intend to talk to commerce minister Anand Sharma about two of India’s main concerns: cricket and trade. As a Fleming, I was struck to learn that recent research has linked the development of cricket to Flemish weavers who settled in England from the 14th century . Today, [...]
Cricket’s Garden Of Eden
The recent Kolkata Test match had it all. High intensity drama, thrills till the second last ball of the penultimate over, fantastic batsmanship and bowling, weather disruption and, finally, controversy over the playing surface. It also had what is now considered a disappearing breed from the Test match arena: an almost capacity crowd on all five [...]