Posts

Posted on

What Australia needs is a new cricket captain

A MOUNTAIN of sorts has been scaled by the England cricket team by defeating Australia by an innings and 71 runs in the second cricket Test in Adelaide. The last time Australia suffered an innings defeat at home was in 1993 when the West Indies were the victors.

The loss has put Australia in a position where it needs to win two of the remaining three Tests and ensure that England does not win any more. Judging by the cricket that has been on display in the first two Tests, this is wishful thinking of a very high order.

England owes more to its inspirational captain Andrew Strauss than anyone cares to document; when nobody notices a captain, it can confidently be said that he or she is playing the role of leader to perfection.

Much praise has been lavished on the batsmen like Alastair Cook, Jonathan Trott and Kevin Pietersen who have scored heavily for England; the bowlers like James Anderson, Steve Finn and Graeme Swann have earned their share of praise too.

But nobody has bothered to remark that when England was up against it, facing a deficit of 221 on the first innings in the first Test, it was the captain, Strauss, who put his head down, scored a century and led the way out of the woods.

Strauss was coming off a third-ball duck in the first innings and was nearly out off the first ball of the second. That makes his achievement all the more creditable.

By the time he was out, for a well-made 110, Strauss had ensured that Australia would have to bat again; the deficit was only 33 when he was dismissed. As a true captain should, he led from the front.

On the final day of the second Test, when Swann was troubling the Australian batsmen the most, with the home team four wickets down and looking like it had a decent chance to save the game, Strauss took the decision to take the new ball.

This, despite the fact that Anderson, one of his new-ball bowlers, had bowled badly in the innings up to that point and his other new-ball bowler Stuart Broad had been ruled out of the game and the series due to a stomach muscle strain.

It was a bold move but his instincts proved him right. Finn got rid of the danger man Mike Hussey, Anderson took two wickets and when the ball was about seven overs old Swann came back into the attack and wrapped up the innings.

His counterpart, Ricky Ponting, has been a woeful failure. His field placings have been bizarre. He has backed the wrong players – Xavier Doherty is no Test-class spinner – and has played only one innings of note, an unbeaten 51. In the second Test, he made 0 and 9, hardly the contribution that a captain should make when the team has its back against a wall.

Yet Australia is looking at everything other than replacing him in order to try and do better in the remaining three Tests. There will be a few changes in the team for the third Test – Doherty will be dropped and Doug Bollinger may be sidelined as well. The same fate may befall Marcus North. Yet Ponting will remain.

Tacking the effects without dealing with the cause is common in today’s world. It is harder to cut down a tree than to remove the branches. Until Ponting is replaced, Australia will continue to plumb the depths of world cricket.

Posted on

Bowlers pay the price, batsmen get off scot-free

PREDICTABLY, Australian left-arm paceman Mitchell Johnson has been dropped from the team to take on England in the second Test in Adelaide.

Johnson returned figures of 0-66 and 0-104 in the first Test, was dismissed for a duck when he batted, and also dropped a catch.

When a team fares well below its best, someone has to be made the scapegoat. Ricky Ponting wasn’t exactly the wisest of captains in the first Test but he has escaped scrutiny.

But what of Marcus North? The left-hander has been having a dreadful time with the bat – but nobody is talking about the possibility of bringing in someone to take his place.

Let’s have a look at the two players, going back all the way to the middle of the year. In two Tests against Pakistan (played in England because of the security threat in Pakistan), North made 0, 20, 16 and 0. He got 6/55 in the second innings of the first Test and did not bowl in the other three innings. Johnson returned figures of 1/31, 0/74, 1/71 and 1/41. His best effort with the bat was 30. North was marginally ahead.

Australia then played a two-Test series in India. North made 0, 10, 128 and 3. He bowled in the first Test, getting 1/39 and 0/8. Johnson got 5/64, 0/50, 3/105 and 0/42 and scored 47 in one of the Tests. I would say that Johnson was clearly ahead in this series if one matches the two players’ performances.

Johnson’s performance in the first Ashes Test has been detailed above. North got 1, did not bat in the second innings, and took one wicket in England’s second innings, the only wicket to fall. Hence, that wicket was of no relevance; the only difference would have been that England would have finished with 0-517 instead of 1-517 and the England openers, Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook, would have become the holders of the record for the first wicket partnership in Tests, displacing Nick McKenzie and Graeme Smith of South Africa who hold the current record of 415, set against Bangladesh in 2008.

Remember one thing: North is primarily playing as a batsman and Johnson, despite having made runs on occasion, is considered the main strike bowler.

Has Johnson fulfilled his primary role? No. Should he be dropped? Well, yes, one can make a case for that. But then the same logic should apply to North. He has done as much as Johnson over the last five Tests, in fact, less.

The argument used to justify North’s inclusion is that there are not many options to fill his spot. Rubbish, there are plenty of batsmen – David Hussey and George Bailey, to name just two – who can fill the role of a number six. Hussey is 33 and Bailey is 28 – but remember, Australia once played a 38-year-old, Bob Holland, to try and defeat the West Indies in 1984-85. And who can forget Colin “Funky” Miller who made his debut for the country at the ripe age of 34?

Age is not a problem. Neither is the lack of batsmen. No, the problem is that cricket has been and will always be a batsmen’s game. The bowlers always bear the brunt when punishment is doled out.

Posted on

The bowlers failed but so did the captain

IT’S the fourth day of a Test match, the first of a series that is the most important of the year for your country. Your team is 202 runs ahead at the start of play; the opposition has knocked off 19 runs of a 221-run advantage that your boys gained in the first innings.

First thing out on the field, what would be your reaction as captain? To put as much pressure on your opponent by using the most threatening and intimidating fields possible or taking a milk-and-water approach that indicates an ambivalent attitude?

Do you show faith in your bowlers by packing the slips cordon and keeping two short-legs to occasionally get in the face of your opponents? Or do you use a standard field, an indication that you are basically a bob each way man even in a situation when your team is clearly in an advantageous position?

The Australian bowlers have copped a lot of flak for letting England nullify a 221-run first-innings deficit and allowing England to make a mammoth 1-517 in its second innings in the drawn first Test.

But the Australian captain Ricky Ponting has escaped scrutiny in toto though the tactics he employed on day four were those of a coward.

At the start of play on the fourth day, Ponting had two fielders on the boundary. For what? Was he trying to win or draw? He had 202 runs to play with, he had nothing to lose.

Remember, Australia is the team which has to win back the Ashes; for England a drawn series will suffice. One cannot blame England for looking for such a result as the whole point of playing five Tests in Australia is to retain the Ashes. That is the prize, nothing else matters.

This is not the first time that Ponting’s inability to captain the country properly has let the team down. It happened earlier this year in England. He is far too cautious and often looks to his own interests, rather than that of the team.

It is unlikely that any remarkable new talent is going to be unearthed in some part of Australia soon enough to make a difference to the Australian team in the remaining four Tests; any new blood brought in will be much like the old.

A trend of picking players based on reasons other than merit has been around for too long and mediocrity has crept in. Australia is fifth in the world Test cricket rankings and that is a good reflection of its strengths.

Ponting is favoured by the selectors because he has become an administration man. He knows when to speak and when to keep his mouth shut. Some months ago, people were theorising that if Australia failed to regain the Ashes, he would be stripped of the captaincy.

But that seems unlikely in the wake of reports that Michael Clarke, his deputy, is not exactly the flavour of choice with the rest of the team.

If Ponting regains the Ashes, he will stay as captain for the World Cup that begins in February next year. And it is also likely that he will continue to captain Australia until he chooses to retire – which may well be in 2013 after the tour of England. Ponting has said often that he wants another chance to win the Ashes in England, having lost two series in 2005 and 2009.

But if he fails to regain the Ashes over the next four Tests, then there will be plenty of pressure from people to play him as a batsman only. He still has some of the magical touch that he displayed in his early career and is easily the best batsman in the team once he gets going.

Posted on

ABC News 24 is a dismal failure

THEY call it ABC News 24. I call it ABC News 23. I think my nomenclature is more accurate since the ABC depends on the BBC to fill up an hour of its news broadcasts late at night, the 1am and 2am slots. But even at those late hours, the BBC tends to highlight what’s wrong with the ABC’s 24-hour effort and exactly how pathetic the latter is.

For one, the ABC’s footage from abroad is always stale. One never gets to see more than one turnover every 24 hours. Indeed, it often goes to 30 or even 36 hours. With a 24-hour channel, one depends on coverage of foreign news quite a bit – there isn’t that much happening on the domestic front.

And the ABC is ill-equipped to cope with such a channel. The spread of correspondents is very thin – for example, one person looks after South Asia, a region where nearly a quarter of humanity lives. This region encompasses two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan, that are crucial to the future of the West. Afghanistan is a country under partial Western occupation and Pakistan is terrorism central.

Being the only Muslim state that has nuclear weapons, Pakistan is of great significance news-wise. If any other state in the region or the Middle East does obtain nukes, you can be sure that Pakistan will be the source. Yet, the ABC has no full-time correspondent there. Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence controls events in Afghanistan but the ABC, which claims to champion good old-fashioned news values, does not rate it important enough to station someone in Islamabad.

And let’s not forget India which is some kind of a bulwark to these countries. It is impossible for one person to spread themselves across this terrain and do anything like justice. Most of the time the correspondent, Sally Sara, is reduced to reading scripts from agency wires while stale footage creeps across the screen.

The ABC News 24 network appears to be a product of the ego of the corporation’s managing director, Mark Scott. He swore to implement it using the available staff. But the ABC is now cutting support staff in various bureaux abroad and also expecting increased output. The gruel will be spread thinner by the addition of water. Never mind if it tastes bad.

Another thing that Scott has championed is the airing of opinion: he obviously feels that ABC staff should have a site where they voice their opinions. Hence the Drum was born. It compromises ABC staff to a large extent as they, being employees of a government-funded body, are not expected to show political bias when it comes to reporting. Yet, via their opinion pieces, their biases are on open display.

The Drum also makes its appearance on the 24-hour TV channel and illustrates the old adage – you can’t make a carpenter out of a plumber, they are two different trades. Steve Cannane, an extremely competent radio broadcaster, is a tepid and boring interlocutor on the program, stiff and evidently uncomfortable and out of place.

The main contributor to the Drum, Annabel Crabb, is also unsuited for television; she was recruited as chief writer for the Drum website and does an excellent job there but her long-winded sentences do not work on television. She ends up monopolising the program and, even then, often cannot complete what she means to say. She is periodically cut off in mid-sentence by Cannane who appears to be obsessed with trying to discuss X number of topics on a given day. Result? The discussion lacks any depth.

The guests on the Drum are, by and large, a boring lot too; even when there are people who can be a bit unconventional (like the chaps from the Chaser, for example), everyone tends to take a cue from Cannane and it becomes boredom central. Members of the Institute of Public Affairs, a right-wing think-tank (stink-tank would be more accurate) appear to have a kind of permanent booking for one seat on the Drum and, as most right-wingers do, tend to make the program as dull as ditchwater.

The way staff have been allocated jobs on News 24 is evidence of hasty decision-making. Virginia Trioli, one of the best and brightest in the ABC, one who can interview people with charm and ferocity, one who has more than a passing knowledge of world affairs, is reduced to reading the news. And then there’s Aly Moore who tends to regard the studio as she does her sofa at home – nothing else can account for the way she tends to lounge on the news desk every few minutes. Moore should always be behind a camera and needs some voice training to tone down the squeakiness of her delivery.

Competing with Cannane for the title of wooden man of 24-hour channels is sports news reader Paul Kennedy. In fact, Kennedy may well have the edge on Cannane. Sport is heavily Sydney-centric, reflecting the traditional bias that led to the nation’s capital being built in Canberra. Kennedy often seems to be operating in the past tense, so frozen is he, something like an animal caught in the glare of headlights.

The hurry with which the ABC set up News 24 is evident in some of the names it has chosen for its programmes. Al Jazeera has a interview programme called One On One; the ABC could do no better than pinch and modify it to One Plus One. This is just one example. One Plus One could also have given its host, Jane Hutcheon, some voice training to speak on a lower key. It grates on the ear.

One lesson that the ABC could have learned from Al Jazeera, which has grown to be a great success because of the journalism it produces, was to pick its correspondents from the areas it covers. A man knows his own home much better than an outsider. But given that Scott pledged to set up the channel with no extra expenditure, the ABC is reduced to recyling and re-recycling. You see the same footage tagged differently on every news programme on the ABC – and it does have a fair few channels.

So what’s new about News 24? You can see Lateline and Lateline Business a few extra times. You can see the 7.30 Report again if you happen to be suffering from insomnia – and what’s more, you can see Four Corners and Media Watch on an HD channel. Forget the fact that the last two named programmes are repeated on the analog channel ABC1 as well.

And before I forget, you can also get the time from ABC News 24 because it has a digital clock on-screen. I find that the most useful bit of the channel as I do not possess a watch.

Posted on

Cancer and religious strife: what Bush, Blair and Howard have sown

THE coalition of the willing invaded Iraq in 2003 in order to secure oil supplies for the West; they have left behind a legacy of religious and ethnic strife and diseases that cannot be cured.

The cancer rate in the city of Fallujah has risen to unimaginable levels; children are born every day with hideous deformities. Radioactivity in many areas is far above the normal level, even factoring in the fact that Iraq was the site of a war in 1991.

Buildings have been abandoned but the Iraqis who move about breathe in the harmful residues and a surge in the birth of deformed children is the result.

Couples in Fallujah are now afraid to have children. For any Arab, children are something to be proud about. But given the rising rate of unnatural births, the number of births has dropped.

The Americans have form in this regard: they bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and the effects of that act of terrorism can be seen even today.

Depleted uranium is used in shells to increase their killing potential; what it leaves behind maims the living. It would be merciful if it killed them straightaway.

Winning hearts and minds? Sure, this is the way to go about it, by ensuring that a nation of deformed children rises up. We see ourselves in our children and the West has left Iraq in no doubt as to how it should start seeing itself.

George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard, meanwhile, have all released their memoirs, defending the decision to invade a sovereign nation. Blair even justifies the bogus 45-minute warning he issued about non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The other legacy that these three world leaders have left behind is religious conflict. Iraqi Christians are increasingly being forced to flee their own country because of attacks by Muslim militants. Iraq was one country in the Middle East where every religious minority could worship in peace.

But that is no longer the case. The level of militancy has risen a thousand-fold and people regard their neighbours with suspicion.

The Americans have exerted heavy pressure on Iraq’s government to keep these issues quiet. They are aided by their own media like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the TV channels like CNN and Fox News. These media organs have more important things — like Sarah Palin’s antics — to report about.

Posted on

When will the US economy collapse?

PRESIDENT Barack Obama recently did something that no other chief executive of the US has in recent times – he came around with a begging bowl to countries in Asia, asking them to increase their exports of American goods so that more jobs would be created in the United States.

Yet, no media outlet highlighted this fact, nobody bothered to note that if the US president was sinking this low then something must be seriously wrong at home.

Obama first went to India, a country that was once considered a Soviet satellite. These days, American firms rely on India to carry out many of their back-office functions at cut-prices. Lots of American companies have branches in India where a lot of their work is done, again at cut-prices.

So here was someone, who is often referred to as the most powerful man in the world, asking a poor country like India to buy more American goods. His next stop was Indonesia, again a poor but populous country, where he repeated his sales pitch.

The last time this happened was when Bush the elder went to Japan in the early 90s and tried to get that country to import more American cars. He was staring down the barrel of defeat due to bad economic conditions at home and finally ended up being a one-term president.

Obama is stuck with terrible economic conditions; he inherited a bad situation from George the younger, and made it worse by his own calls when the economic crisis hit in 2008. Now the US economy is dependent on China but Beijing is increasingly reluctant to continue as the main point of take-up for US dollars when the US continues to act in a way that threatens China.

Japan had a taste of what happens when one listens to US requests when it agreed to devalue its currency back in 1985 and leave things open totally to market forces; the Japanese economy has never recovered and has limped along ever since.

Now China is being asked to devalue its currency and float it so that the US can manipulate things to its advantage. Why would anyone commit economic suicide? The US is trying desperately to bolster any country it can as a counterweight to China and asking China to provide the means for it do so. All the money that comes in is spent on wars in foreign countries and building bases and maintaining them all over the world.

The US has for far too long maintained a high standard of living by exploiting other nations. Trade deals that favour Washington are one way of doing this – in some cases, other countries have been cowed into signing such deals due to subtle threats from the US. In many others, the leaders of smaller countries have sold out and feathered their own nests at the expense of their own people.

It looks like those days are now over and the time of reckoning has arrived. It will be only a few years before we see the eagle begin to crumble as its economic clout fades.

Posted on

As soon as Afghanistan is debated, the old terrorism bogey rears its head

THE Australian government, under pressure from the Greens, a party that is lending it support as it governs as a minority government, has begun a debate on why the country has troops in Afghanistan.

Curiously, just a couple of days after this debate began, we witnessed the spectacle of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation or ASIO – which has yet to announce the capture of any criminal – announcing that it is following hundreds of terror threats and that it has nipped in the bud countless others which could have led to unmeasurable bloodshed on Australian soil.

Call me a sceptic, but this kind of juxtaposition of events has been seen countless times in America during the time when John Ashcroft was attorney-general. With just one motive – heightening the atmosphere of fear. There are never any specifics given (due, of course, to “operational considerations”) but you are expected to believe that threats by the dozen are being snuffed out day after day by an organisation that has done nothing of note ever since it was founded.

The connection is quite clear – the Australian prime minister talked of the terrorist threat being the reason why Australian troops are in Afghanistan, in order to ensure that the country does not again become a haven for the likes of Osama bin Laden. Of course, this is all rather passé given that bin Laden has long fled Afghanistan and is taking refuge in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan.

Doubtless, one needs someone to point out that that threat still exists. Up pops the ASIO director-general with his terrorists-are-hiding-under-your-bed spiel. We’ve come full circle. The only thing that remains is for all moms to check carefully under their children’s beds to check that uncle Osama isn;’t hiding there tonight.

I know it’s too much to hope that the government will actually tell people the truth but they must seriously think Australians are a bunch of mugs to be taken in by this kind of charade.

Some facts about Afghanistan: right now, the Americans are helping the Taliban to negotiate with the Afghan government in the faint hope that there will be no bloodbath when, as is bound to happen, the Taliban takes power in Afghanistan again. The Afghan government has been secretly talking to the Taliban and recently said so itself.

The American government will have to do something concrete in the next 18 months else Barack Obama will end up being a one-term president. And yet the Australian prime minister keeps talking about the country’s troops being there for the next 10 years!

Of what use is such a “debate” where all the old falsehoods are used to justify the sending of 20-year-olds to die for no rhyme or reason?

Posted on

Australia’s cricketing disaster

SHANE Warne, the Australian leg-spinner, was always keen to be captain of the national cricket team. Unfortunately, the Australian cricket administrators are obsessed with the idea that a man who leads the country’s cricket team should also be a saint. Warne did not get the job because of his numerous sexual peccadilloes and Ricky Ponting was given the gig instead.

That apparently still rankles because Warne often embarrasses Ponting with unsolicited advice and comments after he retired. The latest such episode occurred on the final day of the second Test against India, when Warne questioned the field placings provided for Nathan Hauritz, the alleged spinner in the Australian team.

India was chasing 207 to win on the final day of the Test. No team had ever scored that number of runs on the Bangalore wicket to win a Test until that day. Yet India did, with ease. The two Indian spinners, Harbhajan Singh and Pravin Ojha, had helped to bundle out Australia for 223 in its second innings. Both obtained a great deal of purchase from the wicket. The Indian fast bowlers obtained plenty of reverse swing. The Australian bowlers could not do a thing to trouble the Indians.

Australia is now ranked fifth among the nine countries that play Test cricket. It is below India, South Africa, Sri Lanka and even England. Calls are now starting for Ponting’s head. Warne’s comments thus assume a lot of significance.

One reason for Warne’s utterances may be the fact that Steve Smith, the spinner who has Warne’s backing, is yet to be picked for a Test ahead of Hauritz. This, despite the fact that in the first Test of the series against India, we had the peculiar situation of India fighting against the odds to chase down a total of 216 on the final day and Hauritz not bowling even though the pitch was taking turn. What made it even more odd was the fact that Smith was not in the team and Ponting’s spinner of choice was the occasional trundler Marcus North.

Australia rarely picks two spinners. Hence when one man is picked, it is assumed that he is the prime spin talent in the country. Hauritz, sadly, is not up to the mark; he is the poor man’s spinner and does not deserve to play. Ponting does not know how to handle him and that shows. Ponting’s failures are beginning to affect his batting as well.

The next opponent for Australia is the old foe – England. The Ashes which England holds are up for grabs in the Test series that begins in November. That is a matter for even more worry. Ponting won the last home series for the Ashes but promptly lost the next series in England. This was a repeat, as he had also lost the 2005 series.

A loss at home may well mean the loss of the captaincy as well. That could be a blessing for Ponting as he still has a lot to give as a batsman. He is still a class act in full flow. Whether he will be able to function under another captain remains to be seen. But he would do Australian cricket a service by stepping down and playing as a batsman instead.

Posted on

What are Western troops doing in Afghanistan?

TWENTY-ONE Australian soldiers have died in Afghanistan since Canberra decided to join the American mission to that country. Thousands of American soldiers have been killed, and a goodly number of other Western forces have also paid the ultimate sacrifice. But to what end?

All these deaths have been in vain, for it looks very much like the Taliban will slowly come back to power; indeed, the Americans are already talking to the Taliban through proxies in Saudi Arabia in order to try and save face when they (US troops) are forced to crawl back to their bases. That will come about sooner rather than later as the American public will stomach just so many deaths; after that, it will become too much of a political hot potato for President Barack Obama to handle.

After all, the man does not want to be a one-term president. Keeping troops in Afghanistan will push down the ratings of a man who is already not going too well in the opinion polls.

The Americans sent forces to Afghanistan back in 2001, in retaliation for the attacks by al-Qaeda on the US mainland. Even at that stage, it was not very clear what their mission was, apart from exacting revenge. Killing Osama bin Laden was said to be top of the list; presumably killing his top lieutenants was also a priority.

Nine years on, bin Laden is very much alive. His chief aide, Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri, is alive and kicking as well. And the mission to Afghanistan has gone dangerously downhill. A great deal of the money poured into Afghanistan by Western and Arab donors has ended up in the pockets of sundry warlords. Many have repatriated some part of what they have managed to swindle, in the expectation that once the Taliban returns to power, they will have to flee the country if they want to stay alive.

Nobody had any illusions that the Americans would unseat the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist party which was governing Afghanistan at the time of the September 2001 attacks. But was that the end-all and be-all of the American mission? If the aim was to disrupt the activities of terrorists who were likely to plan future attacks on America, then that hasn’t been fulfilled.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who could be better described as the mayor of Kabul as his writ runs only thus far, is already talking to one of the Taliban leaders, Sirajuddin Haqqani, in the hope that he may be able to survive the return of the religious fundamentalists to power. It is highly unlikely that Karzai will be able to stay on and he is probably planning his departure now.

The problem is that the Americans have repeated the mistakes of Great Britain and the Soviet Union and tried to install a government of their liking in Afghanistan. Nobody has ever been able to do that. Afghans do not like outsiders and no matter how much money is used to try and bribe them, they will smile, take the money and then support their own. That is an Afghan trait and has not changed for centuries. Boning up on history would have helped the Americans no end.

Given the number of troops that have been deployed in Afghanistan, it is a joke to even think of controlling the country. Hardly had the troops been deployed when the Americans decided to invade Iraq and made that mission the top priority. The porous borders with states that are not exactly inclined to be helpful to the Americans have compounded the problem. The behaviour of mercenaries hired by the Americans – so-called contractors who handle various security-related tasks – has not helped to any degree. These mercenaries are often prone to smash up a local man’s car simply because they suspect him of being a militant. Not many people in Afghanistan have cars to begin with.

But even if the Americans and their allies had gone on a massive PR blitz to try and endear themselves to the Afghans, it wouldn’t have made much difference. The Afghans don’t mind living in a mess – as long as it is of their own making. They don’t like being invaded, they don’t like foreigners. In fact, which country likes to be ruled by outsiders? The American mission to Afghanistan will end in defeat; it might be a good idea to cut the losses and run right now.

Posted on

History tells us: the ICC must take the blame for match-fixing

IT WOULD be amusing to read all about the apportioning of blame by various people in the wake of the recent revelations about match-fixing, were it not for the fact that the whole thing is so damn serious. But then one should not be surprised about all the breast-beating that is going on – it is common for people to concentrate on the effects and forget the cause.

It does not take much effort to go back to the event that provided the seed for the growth of match-fixing in cricket. Remember, one is not talking about betting on cricket, that has been around for as long as the game has been played.

In 1980 the first international one-day cricket match was held in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. This was sanctioned by the International Cricket Council and it marked the start of trouble. The matches in Sharjah increased in number and India’s win in the 1983 World Cup gave the tournaments held in the desert emirate a fillip.

For one, the Sharjah tournaments were built on one factor – the enmity between India and Pakistan. There was always a third team invited (or even a fourth) to make up the numbers, but given the large numbers of Indian and Pakistani expatriates in the UAE, they were the focus.

Additionally, the Sharjah cricket organisers opened the doors to illegal betting of huge amounts by people of dubious reputations. Apart from the cricket, celebrities from both India and Pakistan were invited to attend. The UAE is a peculiar place – you can walk in to the country with a million dollars in a suitcase and no questions are asked but if you carry a Bible in, you may be questioned for an hour or more. Before oil came into the picture, Dubai was better known as the source of gold smuggling into India.

Both India and Pakistan have massive amounts of black money in their respective economies and lots of this money was used to wager large amounts in Sharjah. A great many dubious people offered awards in Sharjah to buy popularity and these were accepted without any hesitation – Pakistan batsman Javed Miandad earned more than a million dollars in 1986 when he hit a six off the last ball of a game to defeat India and win a tournament for Pakistan.

The UAE is known to harbour a number of people who are wanted in other parts of the world, people like the smuggler Dawood Ibrahim, who fled India in 1993 after he was being sought by police as a suspect in the bombing of the Bombay stock exchange that same year.

It is inconceivable that the ICC was unaware of all the goings-on but it chose to turn a blind eye. Cricketers were benefitting financially – the Sharjah organisers used to present three cricketers with money at every tournament – and the ICC was being paid the fees it sought. What’s more, any ICC bigwig who visited during the tournament was treated like God.

But the tournaments provided the means for illegal bookies and people of their ilk to gain access to players – one merely had to host a reception in Dubai for the cricketers (no liquor is served in hotels in Sharjah, hence the choice of Dubai which is just a 20-minute drive from Sharjah) during the tournament and one could pal up with the best players from India and Pakistan.

The money attracted other teams too and as the years went on the organisers scored their biggest coup by signing the West Indies, at that time the hottest property in world cricket. Australia, England, New Zealand, South Africa, Sri Lanka all came and played and were feted and wined and dined. Nobody raised any question as to why cricket in the desert was needed. It was something like the Packer days again, only this time the ICC gave the whole shindig its blessing.

Prior to Sharjah, there was hardly any talk of throwing a game of cricket. It took a few years for the bookies to develop their contacts to the point where they could make demands. Sharjah began hosting two tournaments a year soon after it started operations and this provided a fast track for unsavoury activities to grow.

in the 1990s , there was more and more talk about matches being influenced by factors other than the players’ ability. On the Indian tour of the West Indies in 1997, one Test, when India fell for 81 when chasing a little over 100 for victory, was a game that came in for some examination. An Indian writer, R. Mohan of the well-known Indian paper, The Hindu, lost his job after his betting activities came to light. And by the turn of the century, a few cricketers had been found out and banned from the game.

It is easy to gain access to junior players once one knows the seniors. And mind you, the seniors need not be in the pay of bookies, but merely acquainted enough to be persuaded to introduce others to the men who pay cricketers to fix games. After all, if you were told that Al Capone wanted to meet you during the heyday of that gentleman’s existence, would you have turned it down?

The ICC never objected to cricket being played in Sharjah. The only reason why the tournaments are no longer being held there is because there is no space on the international calendar after the future tours programme was put into practice. The ICC has even shifted its own headquarters to Dubai – simply because it benefits from the no-tax regime in the UAE and also gets free flights from Emirates airline – which is owned by the ruling family of Dubai – for its officials. When an international body has sold itself out in this manner, can it ever hope to call attention to the wrong-doings of its players?