Pakistan ‘match-fixing’: what’s wrong with this picture?

I’ve been asked to appear on a lot of radio and TV shows since the Pakistan story broke last week. So far, I’ve done nine media interviews (including a long chat with the producer of what appears to be Canada’s answer to Radio 4′s Moral Maze).

As it happens, I am reasonably well placed to comment. SPIN magazine has given a lot of space to exclusive interviews with Pakistani players over the years and I personally have picked up a lot of background information and colour along the way.

However, most of what I’ve said on Five Live, Sky News and BBC London has been based on material very much in the public domain, rather than my own inside knowledge or experience.

Oddly, however, I seem to have been one of the only people pointing some of these things out.

1) Pakistan started the current series with someone in their side who was on police bail for spot-fixing a game in England in 2009: Danish Kaneria. On police bail! In England! For allegedly spot-fixing a game in England!

Does that seem odd to you?

Shouldn’t such a player have been suspended, possibly on full pay, for the duration of an investigation? A bank manager charged with fraud would be put on paid gardening leave, with no presumption of guilt. Does logic not apply in cricket?

2) Mohammad Asif was also in the side. I love watching Asif bowl and I do wish that the following were not true. However, he has three drugs offences against his name and yet there he is/was in Pakistan’s starting XI. Look at the fuss in England over athlete Dwain Chambers being allowed to come back after ONE offence. And yet somehow cricket does not seem bothered by Asif’s case – or not sufficiently bothered to step in and do anything much about it.

3) Kamran Akmal, accused by the team manager of deliberately under-performing and having connections with bookmakers on last winter’s tour of Australia, was also in the side. Seemingly, the PCB had decided that Akmal was not dodgy in the bookmaking sense of the word but, in fact, was just a wicket-keeper who couldn’t catch. (He dropped Mike Hussey four times in Pakistan’s, um, weird defeat to Australia in Sydney.) They kept him in the side,

None of these necessarily has any direct bearing on the current case.

However, it shows an indulgence from the PCB towards its players and an indulgence from the international cricket community towards the PCB but, possibly, towards the unsavoury elements of the game in general.

A lot of shrugging and abdication of responsibility.

And remember – these bits of information are clearly in the public domain. It’s tempting to ask how much indulgence or apathy has been shown towards matters that have never reached the public domain.

As fans, we wish that things weren’t true. We don’t want to hear that Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif have failed drugs tests and won’t be going to the 2007 World Cup. We want to rewind the clock 24 hours and think it never happened and then see them in action at the tournament, two of the world’s great bowlers.

Many people wish that Mohammad Amir, in particular, was not caught up in the latest allegations.

Many within English cricket wish that it had not been recommended by Judge Qayyum’s report that Mushtaq Ahmed not ever be allowed to hold positions in team management.

But wishful thinking is not much of a way to stamp out wrong-doing or set an example or organise justice.

For five days last week, the ICC declared that it was the PCB’s decision whether to suspend the three accused players in the light of the spot-fixing allegations.

Finally, the ICC suspended the players AFTER they had voluntarily withdrawn.

Which says it all.

And no: the ICC suspending the players would not have been a presumption of guilt. It was, surely, legally quite possible, had there been the will; a way to defuse the situation and get the focus back on the game.

Other sports would look at cricket and wonder how competently our game has tried to eradicate unsavoury elements of the game – or even the circumances that have allegedly allowed them to fester.

Hansie Cronje: forgive and forget, urges new biopic

World cricket should forgive the late Hansie Cronje, according to a new biopic of the disgraced South African captain.

The film, produced by Cronje’s brother Frans, is due to be released in the UK in May.

Cronje was banned from cricket for life in October 2000, after admitting taking money from bookmakers to influence the course of matches. The former South African captain was to die in a plane crash just 18 months later. Though inappropriate links with illegal Indian bookmakers were shown to have touched most of the world’s top teams in a series of investigations at the turn of the Millennium – and the captains of both India and Pakistan also received life bans – it is Cronje who remains the name most associated with the scandal.

SPIN first brought news of a feature film about Cronje’s rise and fall back in our first issue in April 2005. After a difficult production process, ‘Hansie’ was released in South Africa last Autumn. Frans Cronje – older than Hansie by  two years – was a first-class cricketer himself and later head coach of Natal Dolphins before turning to film production. Ahead of the film’s release, he came to London to meet SPIN for an exclusive interview.

SPIN: Having been so close to your brother’s story for so long, does the film’s completion feel like closure for you?

Frans Cronje Fortunately, I didn’t feel I needed to use the movie to get closure on Hansie’s death. I got closure because I had to go and identify his body the day after he died. Seeing Hansie’s body there, I realised it wasn’t Hansie. Our life is spiritual, not physical. Your physical body is just a body for the spirit to live in. And that helped me a lot. And I saw Hansie a week before he died and he seemed  to be the old Hansie; he had his smile back and he’d made peace with himself and with God and the people around him, which was really important.

I’m a film producer. That’s what I do. Our company’s mission is to tell stories that inspire. The primary reason for making the movie is because I thought the story was inspirational and it would bring hope and that people could learn something –from the good and bad in Hansie’s life.

Do you understand why people are still so condemning of what your brother did, compared to some of the life-and-death things that went on in South Africa?

If you go back to the Bible, sin is sin. Wrong is wrong. There’s no such thing as big sin and small sin. What Hansie did was seriously wrong. You don’t take money for something that is illegal – betting in India is illegal. Speaking to players and trying to get them to take money is corruption. He and I realised the severity of what he had done.

But it wasn’t just that that made Hansie feel really bad for what he had done. The ’’90s in South Africa was the most amazing period. Everything happened in one decade. Hansie was one of four or five guys who could have become president – people held him in such high esteem, along with [World Cup-winning rugby captain] François Pienaar. Obviously, Nelson Mandela was the general, but he had a few deputies and Hansie was one.

Despite its apparently dark centre, the film has a positive message…
Here was someone who through his own mistakes ended up in the pigsty – but the important thing is: how did he manage to rebuild his life? You could do a film that ended at the King Commission because that’s where a lot of journalists did: ‘He’s fallen from grace and that’s it’. But that wasn’t it. He lived for another two years after that; he was still a person. We didn’t want to make a movie about match-fixing although I think the Indian bookies and mafia bosses are portrayed really well and I think that’s one of the strengths of the movie.

Because sport is so passionately followed in South Africa, was Hansie  more readily forgiven – or more readily condemned?
I think he was more readily forgiven for the type of person he was rather than for being a sports person per se. The people who supported him at his peak did so because of the kind of person he was rather than because he was a cricketer. The same with François Pienaar – even though he won the Rugby World Cup in 95, he’s influential now because he was a charismatic leader. And I think that’s the same for Hansie. There were many better cricketers than Hansie but he has a special talent for making people feel special and bringing the best out of them. A year after he died, Hansie was voted No 12 in the 100 greatest South Africans poll. As a sportsman only Gary Player was rated more highly.

Many in English cricket would be less forgiving…
I’m hoping that the former players in England who have been very critical of Hansie will go and see the film – and not with pre-conceived ‘unforgiveness’ – and maybe get a better understanding of Hansie the person – and also maybe a better understanding of themselves.

I find it intriguing that other ex-players who have messed up things in their lives themselves – maybe not in match-fixing but in other areas of their personal lives – can be so critical of Hansie. Let’s look at our own lives before being critical of others.

The full interview with Frans Cronje appears in the May issue of SPIN, published on April 10 (Good Friday)