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After Independence, their role was taken over by commercial
patronage, and the game run by politicians. Sponsorship
by companies such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi brought in billions of
dollars. It is no coincidence that Indias current
captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who is ranked only fortieth among
the worlds best batsmen, is at around 25
million a year one of the highest paid sportsmen in the world.
Astill observes, however, that the money does not
trickle down. The BCCI spend only small sums on providing
pitches and equipment for the poor and deprived lovers
of the game, which remains principally a middle-class
pursuit.
Astill, who was Delhi Correspondent for The Economist, found
that cricket brought him closer to India. He travelled
the subcontinent interviewing everyone who counts in Indian
cricket, and many more who dont. For example, inRajkot he met a
railway worker called Arvind Pujara, who coached children on a
dilapidated ground belonging to the
railways. His best pupil was his son, Cheteshwar. Starting when
the boy was four, Arvind concentrated on getting him
to play with a straight bat in the classical manner. He was well
enough taught to make his first-class debut at sixteen
and win his first Indian cap at twenty-one. England discovered
him last winter in Ahmedabad when he scored 206 not
out. Wisden declared the elegant Pujara to be the engine of the
Indian middle order. His proud father said his son had
had the worst facilities in India, but the best record.
Astills sympathy for the poor is a recurrent theme. In Dharavi,
one of Mumbais worst slums, he found skinny young
boys whose job was to decorate silken saris, and whose day off
was spent watching cricket on television. It is the only
culture they share with the elite of corrupt politicians,
tycoons and film stars who run the IPL. In the six years of its
existence, they have transformed international cricket and
reflected a profound change in the Indian economy. Vijay
Mallya, a booze magnate from Bangalore, boasts that they have
transitioned India from a saving economy into a
spending economy. Young generations of Indians have become
consumers. Forget about ancient Hindu culture, and
listen to the marketing men.
The IPL is the brainchild of Lalit Modi, son of a sugar baron.
He had a flair for business and an appetite for risk. The
teams were to bear the names of Indian cities, and franchises
would be auctioned. Bids were so high that only tycoons
in industries such as cement, construction, liquor, media and
Bollywood could afford to play. The franchise auction
raised no less than $732.5 million. Television rights sold for
more than $1 billion. Players received unheard-of sums
for a short season in April and May. Dhoni fetched 1.5 million,
more even than Sachin Tendulkar, one of the top five
batsmen ever to have played the game. It was madness, says
Astill, and absolutely compelling.
The IPL was a sensation. Players had complained for years that
they were playing too much cricket, but they had no
objection to increasing the workload when so much was to be
earned so quickly. The game emphasized the skills of
batsmen, who were expected to thrash six after six. Bowlers, who
are limited to four overs each, lose out. Astill admits
he found that many of the games he watched were rubbish, but
adds that for millions of viewers it is the cricket of
their dreams, purest tamasha. A disenchanted former Indian
player compares the IPL to pornographic films: OK for a
bit, but how long can you watch bonking?
As dedicated men of business, the owners of IPL franchises
believe that, like all consumer products, the IPL needs to
freshen itself up. This process began with the dismissal of
Modi, a charming man who had succumbed to a dreadful
case of hubris. In a damning commentary on English county
cricket, one IPL owner remarks: We dont want to end
up with no one watching in the stadium, as if its Lancashire
against Sussex. One solution is to make the League a
year-round business. They need the consent of the BCCI, but
Astill suggests that would be forthcoming. Indians want
still more tamasha. Perhaps because of his own love of India,
Astill makes his case when he says that India is thegravest threat
to crickets precious traditions, but then undermines it by saying
that it is hard to be disapproving
because, for the poor, the game is a consolation, and they
deserve the cricket they most want.
An early generation of writers on The Economistwould have
dismissed this as mawkish nonsense, and concentrated
instead on Indias malign threat to Test cricket. So boring, some
IPL owners told Astill. Tests are where the essence
of cricket is to be found (as Englands 14-run win at Trent
Bridge in the Ashes series recently demonstrated). That is
one damaging charge against Indian cricket, but there is
another, which undermines the legitimacy of the game itself.
Gambling on cricket takes place in all cricket-playing
countries, but nowhere on the same scale as in India. Despite
the efforts of the International Cricket Councils
Anti-Corruption Squad, corruption remains endemic. Only this
spring, match-fixing allegations have been made against a
flamboyant Indian fast bowler, Sreesanth, and two
colleagues in the Rajasthan Royals IPL team; and Mohammad
Ashraful, a former captain of Bangladesh, has been
accused of losing at least two matches in Bangladeshs own
Premier League.
Initially, cricket was organized by eighteenth-century English
aristocrats to give them a chance to gamble their
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fortunes away. When the Marylebone Cricket Club became the
arbiter of the spirit and the rules of cricket in the
nineteenth century, gambling went into hibernation. It was
revived, largely after the popularization of one-day cricket
in the 1980s, especially in India, where it expanded at the same
rate as the Indian economy. The fact that gambling is
illegal in India seems irrelevant, and it appears to have become
an important income stream for mafia bosses in India,
Pakistan and Dubai. Because it is illegal, much of what is
written about it is speculative.
InBookie Gambler Fixer Spy Lalit Modi himself tells Ed Hawkins,
Spot-fixing is rife in the game. And Im talking
globally; its a Pandoras Box. Its staring you straight in the
face, but difficult to prove, almost impossible to prove.
Hawkins spent time in India with bookmakers he had tempted to
talk to him by emailing them tips about the Englishweather and
pitches that might help them make their odds. He learned about the
main varieties of betting on cricket,
all known as spot-fixing: the lunch favourite bets on the number
of runs scored before lunch; the lambi on the
total runs scored in an innings; brackets are a bet on the
number of runs scored in specific segments, say of ten
overs.
The bookies work in crowded rooms dominated by televisions and
heavy black suitcases, each half of which holds
thirty mobile phones: an essential requirement of illegal
betting. A clerk shouts the odds down phones and records
bets on A4 lined pads. The bookies Hawkins got to know were
middlemen passing a large proportion of the profit to
mafia men in Mumbai. Their cost structure covers the cost of
bribes to the local police. The Indian police are not
completely passive, however. A Delhi police investigation in
2000 exposed Hansie Cronje, South Africas captain, as a
match-fixer, and the same investigation revealed that Mohammad
Azharuddin, Indias captain and one of its most
polished batsmen, had thrown three one-day games.
Despite the odds against him, Hawkins has written a brave book
in which he tries to identify some of the matches that
have been fixed. The World Cup semi-final in 2010 between India
and Pakistan became an obsession. He was
confident that Englands win against Sri Lanka in Cardiff in 2011
was fixed, and also a forty-over game between Sussex
and Kent in 2011. English county games are of interest in India
because they appear on television, and the one cast-
iron case of fixing led to the conviction in England of an Essex
bowler, Mervyn Westfield, for accepting 6,000 to
concede at least twelve runs in his first over of a one-day
game. He was sentenced to four months. But, to the
frustration of the reader, never mind the author, the evidence
for all the other allegations is stubbornly circumstantial.
Oddly, Hawkins is most convincing about the most famous of all
recent cases of fixing. Pakistans captain, Salman
Butt, and two talented fast bowlers were entrapped by the News
of the Worldinto accepting 150,000 to bowl no balls
at agreed stages of the innings in a Test against England at
Lords in 2010. TheNews of the Worldclaimed that this
was the biggest story in its history; all three were convicted
and jailed. Ed Hawkins is contemptuous. He insists that no
Indian bookie would take a bet on the timing of a no ball. The
newspaper actually confirmed a less absorbing truth:
that Pakistani cricketers are susceptible to corruption. We knew
that. There remains a great deal that we dont.
Stephen Fayis writing about the Ashes this summer for the
Business Spectator of Melbourne, Australia. His book
Tom Graveney at Lords: A year at the home of cricket was
published in 2005.
