Sreesanth interview

Also read

Sreesanth - A Modern Day Valmiki

The Mudgal report on IPL corruption names five players, as top guns resist capitulation for now

Mihir Srivastava in Outlook India

An IPL Game Of Spot, Bet And Fix
How it all started

• The IPL betting and match-fixing scam became public when the Pune and Kochi teams were disqualified
• The Kochi team had already seen a controversy involving Shashi Tharoor and the now-deceased Sunanda Pushkar
• The Tharoor row led to the exit of IPL founder-commissioner Lalit Modi and his row with BCCI chief N. Srinivasan

What we know now

• The conduct of at least 12 players, including two Australians, invited the scrutiny of Justice Mukul Mudgal
• Indians include five members of the 2011 World Cup-winning squad, two of whom are from the same IPL team
• The owners of at least three IPL teams are believed to be involved in the match-fixing racket
• Nearly 70 per cent of players are believed to be involved in betting on matches indirectly, if not directly
• Given the high purchase costs, team owners and associates have an added incentive to pre-decide match results

***

Indian cricket finds itself on a barely playable wicket. Justice Mukul Mudgal might indirectly have a say on India’s World Cup 2015 squad if the apex court makes public names of top Indian cricketers mentioned in his report on the alleged betting and spot/match-fixing in season 6 of the Indian Premier League (IPL). Top sources say that the 38-page report (with 5,000 pages of annexures) names around a dozen names of former and current players, Indian and international, with their roles in the multi-billion dollar scandal. Players, administrators, politicians, film stars and corporate czars are all protagonists in this sordid drama. It seems like the first draft of a crime thriller.

Although codewords like ‘Individual 2’ and ‘Individual 3’ have been bandied about, the fact is the report names five Indian players who were part of the World Cup-winning team of 2011. Talented and temperamental, they run cricket academies, invest in the hospitality industry and event management, even advertising firms. Their partners in these ventures are the same set of people who form the link between them and the bookies; some are bookies themselves. Moreover, they are Page 3 regulars.

Take the case of a left-handed all-rou­nder. He broke down when questioned by Justice Mudgal. There wasn’t any dispute about his involvement, he was just begging that he be not named and pleaded for a life of dignity, says an insider, a cop involved in the investigation. Mercy, not justice, was also sought by a close friend of this cricketer, his teammate in the World Cup squad. A bowler known to pick fights on and off the cricket field, who spends more time in Mumbai, outside his home state.

The ‘Individual 3’ mentioned in Justice Mudgal’s report is a Chennai Super Kings player. A prolific run-getter and a god-fearing man, he visits the Sai Baba temple in Shirdi regularly with two bookies by his side, and has the protection and patronage of top cricket administrators. The fourth is a celebrity fast bow­ler with a career punctuated by injuries, who was often too unwell to play for the country, but was always fit for the IPL. He, too, has the backing of powerful team-owners. The most significant name is of a top idol, whose incredibly short saga of rags to riches is as exemplary as his passion for speed.

-----India 2011 World Cup team members:

Dhoni, Sehwag, Gambhir, Tendulkar, Yuvraj, Raina, Kohli, Zaheer, Sreesanth, Harbhajan, Y Pathan, Munaf, Nehra, Chawla and Ashwin

----

The flaw, as pointed out over the years by wise men, is in the IPL itself. It had so much to offer to players, administrators, umpires, even commentators, that the whole venture had an unviable air about it. It wasn’t  charity either, where the glitterati altruistically invested to lose money. Instead, it turned out to be a money-­spinner. With marquee pla­yers being bought for millions of dollars, glitz on the ground and expe­nsive after-match parties, intelligent guesses always pointed to dirty money.

The first confirmation came when the Delhi police arrested three players—Sreesanth, Ajith Chandila and Ankeet Chavan—in 2013 for their role in spot-fixing and betting. Neeraj Kumar, the then Delhi police commissioner, refutes the charges that the cops let off the big fish. He confirms that many players were named by the bookies, but that he couldn’t have acted on mere accusations, without conclusive evidence. Rajasthan Royals owner Raj Kundra, he says, confessed to betting, but there was no corroborative evidence, and territorial jurisdiction was an issue. “The investigation was carried out objectively, was able to nail down large number of bookies and set off a chain reaction, with police in other metropolises also ending up investigating betting,” he says. One such investigator was G. Sampath Kumar of the Tamil Nadu police. He was suspended from his job last week on the charges of rec­e­i­ving Rs 55 lakh from a bookie, Uttam C. Jain alias Kitty.

Yellow fever A match involving Chennai Super Kings, now under a corruption-shaped cloud. (Photograph by AFP, From Outlook 01 December 2014)

A family member of one of the three players arrested by the Delhi police met Outlook in a coffee shop at Delhi’s Bengali market. The prosecuted three are just the tip of the iceberg, he says, and the submerged iceberg covers nearly the whole system. The IPL is but a gambling festival, he says, giving examples of how his relative was pulled into betting and match-fixing. “No player can escape the bookies. It’s not a choice,” he says.

---- Also Read

Sreesanth - Another modern day Valmiki?

----

While the Delhi police couldn’t gather enough incriminating evi­dence against the ‘big fish’, Justice Mudgal is forthright about some of them. N. Sriniv­asan—the man who controls both the BCCI and the IPL—can be accused of blatant conflict of interest, says a senior lawyer and cricket administrator. “He’s both the umpire and the player,” he says.

A left-handed all-rounder broke down before Justice Mudgal. The guilty man begged not to be named.

The Mudgal report clearly says that Srinivasan was aware of betting and match-fixing, and he preferred to be a mute spectator. His son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, virtually ran Chennai Super Kings. In the nebulous role of a ‘principal’, he attended team meetings and was a regular companion of players on the ground. It’s clear he was anything but what India and CSK ski­pper Mahendra Singh Dhoni told the Mudgal committee—a “mere cricket enthusiast”. Though lying to an apex court committee is considered perjury, Dhoni, also a vice-president of  Sriniva­san’s India Cements, has consistently bat­ted for his team’s owner. Dhoni’s wife Sakshi was frequently spotted watching IPL matches with former Boll­ywood actor Vindoo Dara Singh, also an acc­used in the 2013 IPL spot-­fixing scandal. In a sting operation by Zee News, Vindoo outlandishly claimed the match-­fixing fiasco was actually the fallout of a fight between  ncp (and former BCCI) chief Sharad Pawar and Srinivasan.


Apart from Meiyappan, the Mud­gal report says IPL chief operating officer Sundar Raman had admitted doing nothing even after knowing that Raj Kundra was involved in bet­ting. Furthermore, a third team (CSK and RR being the other two)—from the renowned stable of good times—is named in the clutch of outfits where the owners/their fam­ily members bet on their own team’s performance.

An eagle eye Justice Mukul Mudgal

Aditya Varma, secretary of the Bihar Cricket Association, treats the battle against corruption in cricket as a personal crusade, and has kept on the warpath in the face of both dire threats and propitiatory wads of cash. He presents a scenario: “If an owner bets, and lets his players, captain and the rest, know that he wants the team to get out on a specific score, say 120 runs, then it’s not betting, it’s match-fixing.”

Varma says there are two categories of culprits—administrators and players. Not bookies, he says, as that’s their job. There are two ways, he says, in which betting/match-fixing takes place: when the match is fixed with the help of owners or administrators, and when players themselves take the initiative for spot-fixing. Bookies are known to live in the same hotel as the players, and interact freely with them during parties. “I will seek an investigation in the conduct of all teams and owners. The story is much murkier than it looks,” says Varma.

As parts of the report have been made public, the government has responded with silence. The top politicians of the country have been, or are, cricket administrators—Arun Jaitley, Amit Shah, Sharad Pawar, Rajiv Shukla and Shashi Tharoor, to name a few. The politics of cricket has little to do with their party affiliations. The Narendra Modi government—seeking a global effort to retrieve billions of dollars of black money stashed in foreign banks—has chosen to ignore the cancer that is eating away Indian cricket. Union finance minister and former Delhi Cricket Association chief Arun Jaitley is mum too. Rajiv Shukla, former IPL chairman and a minister in the UPA cabinet, is anxious about the issue and is actively following the events, says a close friend. Some revered former players have also kept their counsel, perhaps because they are beneficiaries of the system. And Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography, Playing It My Way, is silent about these murky depths in cricket, though some of his close friends are under the scanner.

In April this year, the SC had rejected the BCCI’s proposal to constitute a three-member committee to investig­ate the spot-fixing and betting charges, com­prising ex-CBI director R.K. Rag­­havan, cricketer Ravi Sha­stri and former Cal­cutta High Court chief justice Jai Narain Patel. Raghavan is an affiliated member of the Tamil Nadu Cricket Ass­ociation, headed by Srinivasan, Sha­stri is a salaried BCCI employee and Patel’s bro­­­ther-in-law is Shivlal Yadav, the then interim board president for non-IPL affairs.

The audacious guile that led to the pro­­posal of the panel resurfaced in the belligerence with which the BCCI has made light of the Mudgal committee’s report even before it’s considered by the Supreme Court—belittling it as ‘invalid’, asking the Supreme Court to form another panel and reinstate Srinivasan as BCCI chief (though forced to step down on November 3, he has been effectively in charge through proxy), while the probe is being conducted.

“The ball is now with the apex court, and chances of tampering is less,” says a former cricketer and BCCI office-bearer. With the ball swinging under favourable conditions, wickets might go down in a heap, taking with them reputations and hard-earned records.

Cricket: The game is about dealing with failure

MS Dhoni wasn't cocky but there wasn't any false modesty either: Greg Chappell

Jonathan Selvaraj Posted online: Sun Oct 06 2013, 01:51 hrs

In Visakhapatnam with the under-19 team, Greg Chappell talks about Australia's changing cricketing mindset and his eventful coaching stint in India. He opens up to Jonathan Selvaraj as he revisits the dressing room that had ageing seniors, an out-of-form captain and a rookie wicket-keeper who was a natural leader.

In what capacity are you connected with the Australia under-19 team?
I’ve come in as National Talent Manager. I’m chairman of our youth selection panel. I’ve been in charge for three years now and I normally travel with the U-19s as a youth selector and manager. But when Stuart Law took up the Queensland job, then we had to do some reshuffling. And that’s why I came back as the coach.


Of late a number of Australia U-19 players have been blooded into first class cricket and the senior team ...
Five years ago we came to the conclusion that it was taking on average four years for the U-19 players to get on state contracts. That was too long. So the Second XI competition was changed to a U-23 competition (Futures League). I think it has been quite successful. Twelve of the players who played the 2010 Junior World Cup went on to get state contracts as did 13 from last year’s World Cup. That’s considering three of our best bowlers — Pat Cummins, Ashton Agar and the wrist spinner James Muirhead — were injured. Those three boys also went on to state contracts and of course Cummins and Agar have played international cricket.


Why do you have to give them a push?
The international programme has become busier and T20 cricket has made it busier still. International players don’t play domestic cricket. And after professionalisation at our domestic level, those players don’t play club cricket. That’s had an impact on the younger players. We have come to the understanding that our club cricket and our domestic cricket can’t do the job that it once did. So we have to identify the ones we think have potential and invest in them.


So doesn’t domestic cricket and the experience that comes with it count?
Playing for ten years doesn’t necessarily give you 10 years’ experience. It could just be that you had one year’s experience ten times. If you are not getting better, then your experience is useless. Performance in domestic cricket up to a point is important but once somebody with the skills that you require shows the ability to score runs or take wickets at that level, the sooner you get them to the next level, the better.


How different is it to coach a U-19 team from a senior team. Are the players scared of you?
No, they are not scared. They are respectful but they are not in awe of me. I am a resource like the rest of our support staff. My role at this level is different from the role at state level and the role at international level.


What is it that you look for in a young cricketer?
It is about assessing their potential. Have they got the skills that historically do well in Test cricket. Can they bowl fast? Are they someone who gets bounce? Can they swing the ball? Do they put some revs on the ball? The first thing I’m interested in, in a batsman is can they read lengths well because that means they are watching the ball. If they are going forward to balls they should be back to then there is a problem. How do they read the game on the field? I am looking for things that the scorecard can’t tell me.




Could you give an example of someone you noticed who read length well during your stint as India coach. What about MS Dhoni?
MS Dhoni came into the one-day team just before I joined as coach. Most people saw him just as a front-foot hitter. One day I saw him batting against Ajit Agarkar on a very slow wicket at the Chinnaswamy Stadium and he was very comfortable on the front foot. Ajit has a very good bouncer and I thought I would like to see how he responds to that. So Ajit bowled him the perfect bouncer and the next thing you know he had hit the ball to the top of the roof. So I said 'Ok he reads length well'. It wasn’t as if he was constantly looking to get to the front foot and that was his only skill.


Was that the only thing that set him out?
His reading of the game was incredible. He had a calmness and an inner strength which wasn’t something I had seen a lot of in other cricketers. He was very confident. He wasn’t cocky but there wasn’t any false modesty either. If he thought he could do something, he would go ahead and say he could do it. Both in India and Australia you have a lot of players who are afraid to stand up because they feel they might be thought of as being ahead of themselves or setting themselves up for failure. He had no concerns about that. He was supremely confident in his own ability. He had some work to do with his wicketkeeping but you could see he had the basics. I saw him as far more than a one-day cricketer. I could see him as a Test cricketer. And I could certainly see him as a captain.


Why do you say that?
His ability in the Indian dressing room to move between the seniors and the juniors was unique. There was nobody else I saw that could compare. Even some of the seniors struggled with other seniors. Not just physical strength but also an emotional strength … a spiritual strength. He knew who he was. He didn’t have any doubts about his ability to play at that level.


It wouldn’t have been easy for him. He comes from a state not really known for its cricket.
That’s interesting. We had a camp in Bangalore early on. I wanted the guys to talk about themselves. I had come in knowing some of the senior players because I had seen them play and I had met many of them before. But I wanted to know about their life and cricket. And it was an amazing story of where he had come from and how he had learned his cricket playing on the streets with his friends and at each level how he had to prove himself again because each time he came in he was the new boy. He talked very well about how each of those steps had given him something. Some confidence, some experience, some knowledge.


What were you looking for in these sessions?
I was looking not just for cricketing talent but also something extra which would help them succeed. Not everyone was cut out for a life as a professional cricketer. These guys are on the road for ten months of the year. You are separated from your friends, family and support structures. Not everyone can cope with it. I was looking for that inner strength. That ability to be able to be self-contained. Also you have to have a sense of humor.


Why sense of humour?
This game is about dealing with failure. Bradman batted 80 times in Test cricket and he only got 29 hundreds. So he failed 51 times. The rest of us have had a huge struggle. It’s only those who accept that they are going to fail a lot and have a belief that their method will work will be able to keep at it. Dhoni’s method was and is unique. Not many people play like him, but he has immense confidence in it. And that’s all that really matters.


What did you see in Suresh Raina?
There was an X factor there. He had the ability to score runs quickly. He read length well and he had shots all around the wicket. He was a brilliant fielder, a more-than-useful all-rounder. I saw him first at a camp in Bangalore. This was simply a way for me to see some talent. We had a camp for the bowlers and for the batsmen. There were a lot of good players but only a few had that X factor.



Anyone else with X factor?
Another one was Sreesanth. I was standing on the far side of the ground and I moved to second slip where I had fielded my whole career and that’s a good place for me to get my look at him. And I kept seeing the ball coming through to the keeper. He had a very easy action and there was some pace there. And as I said before, genuine pace excites me. So I spoke to others and they said 'oh no he is from Kerala and he doesn’t get wickets'. So I talked to other people and they said he doesn’t get a lot of wickets but he gets a lot of nicks. He just never had players who could catch the ball. So as I have said before, it isn’t about wickets, it’s about how many times you beat the bat. How often do you get the outside edge, how many times do you hit them on the pads. It could be how many times you can draw a false stroke.



How do you remember your time in India?
Far from regretting the experience, I look back at my time in India with great fondness. Most of my experiences here were very good. There were parts that I could have done without. But that happens. When I look back it was overwhelmingly positive. It was a wonderful opportunity and a great honour to be asked to coach someone else’s country. I couldn’t coach Australia. Coaching India wasn’t the next best thing, it was the best thing. India is the hub of cricket in the world these days and to work in that environment and try and understand it a bit better… I consider myself very fortunate.


How did you try to understand the culture? You read a lot. Did you go through books?
I have a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. I read it, I still read it. I have a copy of the Koran. I read that as well. I’m interested in all of that. (Ramesh) Mane the team physio was a Brahmakumari (follower). We went with him to the temple in Bandra. My wife went to the Hare Krishna temple in Bangalore where they serve meals to thousands of kids. When we went to Pakistan, Saeed Anwar took me to a teaching mosque outside Lahore. I wanted to understand that a bit more because we had Muslim players in our team — Wasim Jaffer, Mohammad Kaif, Irfan Pathan and Zaheer Khan. I felt I needed to understand something. I mean I couldn’t speak the language, and I just wanted to understand their world a little bit better, in the hope that that would help me, help them.



Did the players appreciate that you were trying to understand their world?
They might not have been aware of some of it. I went to Irfan’s home in Baroda and of course they couldn’t speak much English and of course I couldn’t speak any Urdu. But you look into someone’s eyes and you can understand. Irfan’s mother spoke to my wife and she said “thank you for looking after my son". And we got a thrill from the fact that they appreciated that we were looking after their kids. And they were like our kids. Because they were young, they were vulnerable and they needed someone to look out for them.



So what were the high points of your stay?
My only interest in the time that I was in India was what was best for the Indian cricket team. The whole thing was a spiritual experience. The education point of view was one thing that we really focused on. India was struggling in one-day cricket, particularly chasing. And we made a process of getting the team to understand how to chase. And when we had seventeen wins in a row that was an enormous achievement. And it wasn’t an achievement for me, it was an achievement for that group. They had to buy into it. Rahul Dravid as captain had to buy into it. There were a lot of risks. There were criticisms we were changing the team, we were changing the batting order.. And the fact that we got the guys buying in was tremendous.


What went wrong when you were coach of India?
AS you know in that role, the spotlight is such that nobody wants to understand what is going on underneath. All they saw was what they wanted to. If it had worked, you would be a hero and if it hadn’t, you would have been a zero. Generally what I have found in life is what you see isn’t necessarily the whole story. But no one was really looking at what Greg Chappell the coach was saying, and try and understand Greg Chappell the person. I tried to explain what we were trying to do, but in fact, it was counterproductive. People just used it against me.


Have you made your peace with not just what happened but some of the people involved?
I haven’t spoken to some of them, but you move on. I was in Kolkata earlier in the year and I learned that Sourav’s father had passed away and I rang him and spoke to him at that time and passed on condolences.


Was he surprised?
I’m sure he was a little surprised but he said he appreciated it very much. As I explained to him at the time it wasn’t anything personal (about the decisions I made). I rather liked Sourav and I admired him as a cricketer but at that point he probably wasn’t the best person to be in that position.




Could you have avoided some of the decisions?
When you take a decision, you go with it all the way regardless of what happens. I believed and it was agreed that this was the best team for Indian cricket and the team at that stage. Sections of the media wanted to portray that it was me against Sourav. But it was nothing to do with that. It was purely to do with the cricket. In fact I quite liked Sourav and I have had some great experiences with him. He had been with me in Sydney before the tour of Australia in 2003, and it was a wonderful experience. And I said it before and even subsequent to the issues that we have had that Sourav considers me the best batting coach he ever had. So we had a mutual respect but I hardly expected him to agree with some of the decisions I made. But our relationship was separate from our job. If he had been my brother I would have done the same thing.

Sreesanth ban 'against principles of natural justice'

Nagraj Gollapudi in Cricinfo

Sreesanth's legal counsel has called the life ban imposed by the BCCI "bizarre", against the principles of natural justice and unlikely to stand legal scrutiny, and said the player would challenge the ban in court once he received a copy of the order. A day after Sreesanth was handed the ban by the BCCI's disciplinary committee, his counsel Rebecca John said the biggest flaw was the report drew heavily on the police findings in the criminal case, which itself is yet to reach a verdict.

The sanctions were based on the report compiled by the board's anti-corruption commissioner Ravi Sawani.

"The [BCCI] order is completely against the principles of natural justice," John told ESPNcricinfo. If Sawani had relied so heavily on the findings of Delhi Police, she said, then the least he and the BCCI should have done was wait for the final verdict by the Patiala House Court in Delhi, which is hearing the case.

------

Also read

Sreesanth - Another modern day Valmiki?

-----

"It has based its findings on personal interactions with members of Delhi Police as well as taken material from the chargesheet that has been filed by the police before a sessions court. If that is so then they should have waited for the court to determine whether or not any of this holds up in legal proceedings. They just picked up conversations they had with members of Delhi Police where they said Sreesanth and other members of the cricketing community confessed before them. It is a very, very loose report with little or no substance in it," John, who was hired by Sreesanth as soon as Delhi Police arrested him on corruption charges during the IPL in May, said.

She pointed out that the evidence produced by Delhi Police against all the Rajasthan Royal players was found to be insufficient to keep them in custody - the sessions court has granted bail to all of them, including Sreesanth. "The fact is that the sessions court has released players on bail and said none of this adds up as a case. [The court said] it is very, very tenuous - the link between whatever bookie you are saying had a role to play and the players, particularly Sreesanth, and granted him bail. And then this BCCI's one-man committee says that Sreesanth is guilty of spot-fixing and hands over a life sentence to him. Not only is it is excessive, it is completely contrary to all principles of natural justice."

John said that from what she had read of his report on the internet, Sawani's findings, especially on Sreesanth, never added up to a case. "How does he come to a conclusion? By having personal conversations with police officials. And you are basing your findings on these?"

In his report Sawani had noted that he listened to and read the transcripts of audio tapes in possession of Delhi Police of conversations between Sreesanth and the alleged bookie. "If you want to read these audio tapes, which are part of the Delhi Police [evidence] in a criminal trial, the link is so tenuous. You will believe it only because the Special Cell of Delhi Police is saying you will have to believe it in a particular way. In any case these are allegations which have to be assessed, processed and a finding has to be determined by a court of law," John said.

According to John Sreesanth is on bail only because "prima facie" Delhi Police had not managed to press a foolproof case against him. "The only reason the life ban was imposed - Mr Srinivasan was very keen to tell the public and the people of India he was treating [the issue] with a heavy hand and some people had to be made scapegoats," John said.

"What is more annoying form the point of the view of the players is that they have let the big fish get away. What happens to Mr Srinivasan. He is owner of Chennai Super Kings and there is a case of conflict of interest pending in the Supreme Court against him. The Bombay High Court recently had called the two-member committee illegal after it cleared Gurunath Meiyappan and Raj Kundra [part of Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals] from corruption charges.

"Now when the BCCI, of which Srinivasan is the de facto or de jure head, conducts itself in this kind of fashion and then it hands over these sentences to players, who are soft targets, it is a little bizarre," John said.

The Sreesanth In All Of Us

The story of the demise of India’s angriest cricketer is the story of an average man who dreamt big, had a taste of a glamorous world, never established himself, kept fighting to stay in that world, and, in the process, threw it all away. By Shiv Visvanathan 

Posted on June 19 Wed, 2013 in Man's World India By Editor

A wise old friend watching my hysteria over the spot-fixing scandal silenced me by saying, there is a bit of Sreesanth in all of us. “What went wrong with Sree was what could go wrong with any one of us. Sreesanth is the boy next door. Only, he does not go to IIT but becomes a professional cricketer.” 

Sreesanth looks like an overgrown teenager. “Look at him,” she said, “he looks like a Malayali Dennis the Menace, impudent, scruffy and desperate for attention. Instead of a hapless Joey, who followed Dennis lovingly, Sree gets a calculating Jiju. Jiju fixes Sreesanth’s life.”

 ----------------------------

Also read

Sreesanth - A Modern Day Valmiki

------------------------------

It is not easy to be a Sreesanth. Sreesanth, like most of us, is a process, a rite of passage. He has not arrived yet. Occasionally, he gets a peck at the Holy Grail, but the next moment, he is dropped from the team. To have not yet arrived, like a Dravid, Zaheer or a Kumble has, is a painful thing. You always feel an extra desperation for a cameo role. You want to be a personality, a character, memorable beyond a game. Modest people do not have to have modest dreams. Sreesanth dreamt big. He wanted to be seen and heard. 

In cricket, substance could always do with style. Like any teenager — and remember, most Indian males are teenagers till 40 — Sreesanth enjoyed building hype around himself. He grimaced, he threw tantrums, he created a new dialect in sledging. His encounters made news. He was funky and spunky. He was a caricature of a cricketer, whose adrenaline drove his judgments. Sometimes, when your juices flow and you stand up to artful sledgers, such as Andrew Symonds, you become, even feel like a man. 

You have to watch Sreesanth’s performances from an ethological perspective. He grimaces like a gorilla, beats his chest; when he gets a wicket, he runs, screaming, across the pitch and glowers triumphantly at the batsman. It is animal aggression displayed like a tribal ritual. Of course, one has to be careful. When you encounter a bigger, more violent animal, such as Bhajji, retreat and humiliation is in order. A tear or two makes you human. 

In cricket, like in hunting, you have to go for the kill. Without victory, your antics become a distraction, a sideshow. Being a sideshow is painful when you are on stage. Off stage, you get more leeway. You are seen as entertainment; you command attention. Cricket and B-grade Bollywood have a wonderful affinity for each other. The sports pages are hand in glove with Page 3. For someone like Sree, the world of bars, night clubs and women becomes an appendage to your status as a cricketer. The distractions become the attractions. Late nights chew into your discipline. 

Time eats into sportsmen like a termite. You can be precocious at 20, not five years later. Your fans behave like accountants; they demand a list of your exploits on the field. Your team-mates shrug off the hype, they only want to kill. Suddenly, sledging is not entertainment; it is a distraction, time lost. 

It is not that you do not try. You push yourself hard, but regular results are not easy. You watch senior cricketers such as Dravid and Tendulkar rework their bodies, their styles. There is steel in their temperaments, they deliver like metronomes, and you watch with awe. You know you cannot be them, but you want to play alongside them. You realise that cricket, like character building, is hard work. Practice is a way of life for these stalwarts. 

You start keeping a diary. You promise to keep your cool. You work at it. But your temper bursts like an unwelcome pimple, when you least want it to. Worse, when success is elusive, people sense the buffoon in you. You are laughed at. Life suddenly seems unfair. 

The social world outside does not see all this. On the field, you might be a lesser player, but off the field, you are still a star, a name. Then, the other talents that you have nurtured come into play. You can sing, you have dreams of being a rock star. A film or two might enhance your world, especially if you have two nubile women cast alongside you. The romance of cinema blending with the romance of cricket is your ultimate dream. Suddenly, life and its possibilities appear like fun. It matters little if you have to produce the film yourself. 

You realise that walking the ramp, with a model in tow, is a bit like running up to bowl. Adrenaline pumps through you. The applause is heartening. Instead of drab national colours grimed in sweat, your costume smells of scent. You dance and sing, your body moves with ease and the fantasy of a new spectacle takes over. A star like Sreesanth should be twice born, once in cricket and again in film. It is heady. 

Meanwhile, you work desperately on yourself, at anger management. It just means you have to avoid brawls in public, not beat up intrusive passengers at airports. After all, you have a status to maintain. You are still Sreesanth the star, a man known to chief ministers. Shashi Tharoor, your secret hero, has called you the pride of Kerala. 

Playing for the nation is a heady experience. But then there is the magic world of IPL, part circus, part gladiatorial game, part hype. It is the greatest spectacle of all. Lalit Modi makes Barnum sound second rate. 

IPL is finance capital. Everything is a commodity. Every ball, every run is commoditised and auctioned by punters. An over can provide the earnings of a decade. The trouble with IPL is that it is ruthless. Yesterday’s stars are forgotten. You live in the instant. Everything has to be bigger, better, quicker. You live only as a spectacle, and you need spectacles in daily life. You want the best of women and entertainment. Sadly, life gets inflationary. The more you enjoy this, the less you count in the world of cricket. 

Yet, you feel good in this social world of bars and night clubs and starlets. The juices flow. Your ego inflates as people salute you. Sreesanth is still a star. You are seen as fun, even if friend Jiju helps get the women. Giving in to temptation always appears fail-safe. You cannot go wrong. Match-fixing is sinister. Spot-fixing seems like a cleverer world: a win-win world in which the punter and the fan are both happy. It is like rewriting a tiny part of the script; the integrity of cricket remains untouched. All it requires is a few coded signals. A few minutes become a lifetime investment. It reduces anxiety. Money to throw around is always welcome. Jiju and he convince each other that it is a perfect move. 

Problem is, life is full of reverse-swings. Idiot cops outsmart you. The Delhi police paint you as the artful dodger. A world collapses. One minute you are high on the game and your companion, and then cops pick you up. You think it is a mistake. You ask them to call your political friends. They seem implacable. Life as a joyride is over. You look in the mirror and the sledger has become a sleazeball. You wish time had stopped a year ago. 

Suddenly, you are dirt, contaminated stuff, an object to be analysed. You cannot huff and puff and blow your opponents away. You have destroyed other people’s fairytales. That is what no one will forgive you for. The press performs postmortems on your career. People take your world apart looking for reasons and causes. 

There is only one thing Sreesanth will not be able to forgive himself for. It is the television interview in which his mother and sister protest his innocence. He has destroyed their fairytale too. One can smell sadness like rot in the air. The dream has ended. 

Tamasha and a quick buck

by Girish Menon

Today, Sharad Pawar joined the rising crescendo of voices asking for N Srinivasan the BCCI chief to demit office. He is, i.e. Pawar, the latest bigwig who has provided ballast to the 'Srinivasan must go' campaign. And since most of reported opinion is of bigwigs, this writer suggests that news organisations should attempt to lift their wigs and examine what motivation underlies these utterances.

To this writer, opportunism is the premise that seems to unite both the supporters and opponents of Srinivasan. From Farooq Abdullah to Gavaskar to Scindia to Pawar, all of them appear to have a 'dog in the fight'. Hence their views are based on ulterior motives and not really with a view to clean the Augean stables. Yet, news organisations refuse to highlight views of the non big wigs. This author wrote a piece, 'Sreesanth - Another Modern Day Valmiki?' but Cricinfo refused to publish it.

In short the debate appears to be an incestuous fight between a group governing the BCCI and another group who wish to replace them. And news organisations seem to be taking positions based on which group will get them a seat at the trough?

The disenfranchised cricket loving Indian public realise that their own views do not count. Hence, like the Saudis who turn up for the Friday post prayer beheading, they turned up in large numbers for the IPL final realising full well that the result of the game could have been pre ordained. They looked on the event as pure tamasha (theatre) and maybe some may have even bet on the underdog to win because that is the only way they and the omnipotent bookie can both make a sure buck.

Match Fixing? It's people like us doing it

It's convenient to blame the underworld for every instance of cricket fixing, but it's ordinary punters who are behind many of them

Ed Hawkins

May 22, 2013

 

	The recent spot-fixing allegations have revived the discussions about the underground betting network in India © AFP  Enlarge
Related Links Ian Chappell : Anti-corruption efforts need to be proactive News : BCCI to regulate player agents News : BCCI suspends trio, Srinivasan says IPL not 'untenable' In Focus: Corruption in cricket Teams: India

In late 2011 and 2012 I met with some of India's illegal bookmakers, stayed in their homes, ate with their families, attended cricket matches with them, watched - and helped - them take bets.

"You were brave," many people say. "Did you not fear for your life?" The answer is the same each time. "No, they were perfectly charming."

Ah, but that is all part of the act, you might say. They are skilled manipulators, those bookies; one minute a flashing smile, the next a flashing blade. And so it has been following the allegations about three Rajasthan players having indulged in spot-fixing in the Indian Premier League.

It is de rigueur these days when such a story breaks that attention is immediately turned on India's underworld, the mafia dons who cajole players into performing favours on the pitch. If they don't put up their side of the bargain, threats and intimidation follow. D Company, the mafia organisation run by the infamous Dawood Ibrahim, usually gets a mention. Then the stock phrase "Once a player is in, he can't get out" trips off the tongue.

But is that really true? Are there players who fear for their life if they fail to concede a certain number of runs off an over? It is possible, but there is evidence that suggests that the underworld grip that threatens to choke a player is a convenient excuse for those caught with their hands in the till.

The "fix" of the sort that Sreesanth, Ankeet Chavan and Ajit Chandila have been accused of is, in polite terms, chicken feed to D Company. They are far more interested in organising match results, where returns are incomparable to those from spot-fixing. This smacks of a low level scam, summed up succinctly by Vinay, a bookie from Bhopal. "We are trying to make our living in a corrupt country, and we do this by taking any opportunity we can," he says.

Quite. The average Indian bookmaker is nothing if not an opportunist, and it is that personality trait, rather than a tendency for violence, that plays a part in fixes. It is an unpalatable truth for cricket that any bookmaker, or punter, given access to a player, can organise a fix without using the word "mafia" or whispering the name "Dawood". Yes, there is an organised crime network at play but the majority of corruption attempted is by small groups of ordinary folk.

To understand why spot-fixing can be so easy to organise is to understand how the illegal Indian gambling market operates, and therefore how it can be manipulated.

There are estimated to be more than 70,000 bookmakers in India. Despite it being unregulated, it is highly organised and works much like a legalised system. In England the big four bookmakers might be considered to be William Hill, Ladbrokes, Bet365 and Coral. Each of those bookies sets their own odds, and supplies them to the managers of their shops dotted all around the country.

In India there are four big bookmakers, known as the syndicates. Two have their roots in Delhi and the others in Mumbai and Nagpur. Each of those bookies sets their own odds and supplies them to managers around the country. These "managers" - in actual fact they are bookmakers themselves - who take bets from their customers are ranked by the size of their customer base. First-tier bookmakers have up to or more than 1000. A fourth-tier bookmaker might have only 20 or 30. Like a franchise arrangement, the "managers" pay for the goods supplied.

There are, though, two significant differences between the English and Indian models. The first is that whereas Hill's and Ladbrokes might offer a wide variety of bets, in India you can only bet on four outcomes: the match result, the innings runs, brackets (a certain number of runs to be scored in a certain number of overs), and what is known as the lunch favourite. The lunch favourite is where the customer is offered a bet on following the team that is the favourite at the lunch break or innings break.

The second is that where Hill's will offer different prices from Ladbrokes for each of their various segments in an IPL match, the Indian system will be almost uniform; the majority of bookmakers will be using the same prices. One set of odds for only four markets, with each syndicate doing its share of the work.

Each of those four syndicates has their own area of expertise. The top Delhi syndicate will look after betting before a ball has been bowled, providing odds pre-match. When the game starts, its work generally stops. The other syndicate connected to Delhi, known as the Shibu, operates the brackets odds. The Mumbai syndicate will take care of the ball-by-ball betting for match odds and innings runs. The fourth, the Nagpur syndicate, is a rival to the Mumbai operation.

So we have a swathe of bookmakers all using the same odds. It is the perfect environment for corruption.

However, it is not an exact science and the anatomy of fixes and the perpetrators can differ. Indeed, Vinay, who is a first-tier bookmaker and close to the syndicate kingpins, estimates that half of all fixes are organised by bookmakers, the rest by run-of-the-mill punters - any Tom, Dick, or Hari who has a relationship with a player.

	There are estimated to be more than 70,000 bookmakers in India. Despite it being unregulated, it is highly organised and works much like a legalised system

The most obvious fixes can come right from the top of the tree: the syndicates, who some believe take their orders from D Company. If a syndicate has organised for a team to lose or paid a bowler to concede a certain number of runs, they can supply "fake" odds to the tens of thousands of bookmakers, influencing millions of gamblers to bet the way they want them to.

If we use a bowler agreeing to concede more than 13 runs an over as an example, the ability to coin the crores from market manipulation is clear. The bracket, normally set for the first six overs in an IPL match, is an over-or-under bet. The syndicate will estimate that, say, between 42 and 45 runs will be scored. Gamblers will reckon it will be lower/higher and bet accordingly.

Before a ball has been bowled the syndicate would have set the bracket, usually for the number of runs in the first six overs, at a figure that punters would have reckoned was too high, tricking them into going low. It is an artful fraud and not 100% foolproof because of the need to get the "fake" bracket quote right from the start.

If the syndicate was not in on the fix then it would have been created by a group of bookmakers who had decided to operate outside of the system. According to sources in the illegal market, this is the most likely scenario in the current case. This theory holds water, given the raft of bookmakers arrested. They could have manipulated the odds in exactly the same way a syndicate would, by convening what is known as a "party", a group of bookmakers who have agreed to pool resources and maximise profits.

Another option would have been for this "party" to become punters for the day, and place multiple bets (the average bet in India dwarfs those in markets where betting is legal, and is estimated at Rs 100,000 or around $1800) by going "over" the brackets, cosseted by their arrangement with the crooked player. They would have roped in friends and family to place the wagers with as many bookies as possible. This is the method used by an ordinary punter with inside information, proving that you don't need to be a bookmaker to fix a match.

What links punter and bookmaker - and there is a relative war for inside information on the illegal markets with one trying to outdo the other - is the acceptance that both are taking a risk. They know that, still, this is a gamble. A bet. Circumstances may conspire against them, so the profligate over organised or the maiden ordered may not transpire. If not, the player pays back the money. Call it honour among thieves.

Sreesanth - Another modern day Valmiki?

by Girish Menon

Sage Valmiki's life has been emulated by many robber barons of the world and it provides a prototype for Sreesanth to emulate in order to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the Indian public.

Valmiki, the writer of the Indian epic on ideal behaviour The Ramayana, was a low caste robber who preyed on victims in order to feed his family. In latter life, probably after accumulating wealth, he turned into a philosopher and his diktats on ideal behaviour for an individual are still recognised as the right way for a Hindu.

Valmiki's transformation is a theme, recognised by David Mandelbaum in his treatise 'Society in India', that shows dynamism and upward mobility in what was once considered a stratified and calcified Indian caste system. Mandelbaum's thesis has been that contrary to prevalent mythology the Indian caste system provides an opportunity for mobility in two major steps. Firstly, the individual has to attain secular wealth and this should be followed by copying the social mores of the prevalent elites.

Mandelbaum talks about the Kayastha caste, scribes by trade, who were very low in the Hindu hierarchy before the period of Muslim rulers in Indian history. The Kayastha's writing and translation skills came into demand during the Muslim rule, and this helped them acquire secular wealth and power in the courts. Thus over time and after learning the mores of their social superiors they ascended to a status that is high even today in modern India.

The Ambani family's history has parallels to Valmiki too. Dhirubhai Ambani fell foul of the law on many occasions during his wealth accumulation period. Today, the Ambani empire resembles the Mughal empire in its heydays. And all the celebrities and wannabes look to them for patronage. One of the Ambani scions even owns a cricket team, the Mumbai Indians, which has some of the greatest cricketers on its payroll.

Mohd. Azharuddin, former Indian cricket team captain, is another Indian Valmiki. Today, he is a Member of Parliament from the ruling Congress party. There may also be many other Valmikis who have not been publicly found out, but who having amassed secular wealth find it imperative to advise others on the ideal behaviour in life.

So all is not lost for Sreesanth. He could take a leaf from Suresh Kalmadi's book and stay away from the public eye for some time in a protected environment like Tihar jail. When released he could don some saffron robes, get a BJP endorsement and end up as a Member of Parliament. Given that the lotus is its election symbol, image consultants and spin doctors will find it easy to draw a parallel between the flower's development and the transformation of Sreesanth.

This writer plays for CamKerala CC in the Cambs league.

-------

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING - Why the IPL’s critics are mean and wrong

Mukul Kesavan

The uproar about the IPL following the ‘revelations’ about S. Sreesanth and his erring teammates threatens to become farcical. Sting-meister Aniruddha Bahal of Cobrapost suggested on a television show that franchises ought to be punished for the misdemeanours of contracted players. Bahal reached for and found a precedent for his prescription from a different game in a foreign country: the relegation of the Italian football club, Juventus, to a lower league because some of its players had transgressed. Are we seriously citing Silvio Berlusconi’s country as a model of corporate governance? Please. We can do without Serie A as a moral exemplar. Punishing companies for the criminality of their employees… what will these hacks dream up next? The other storm in this teacup is the suggestion that an isolated instance of spot-fixing is symptomatic of a more general shadiness in the IPL. Instead of celebrating the league as the beating heart of cricketing livelihood and hailing the BCCI as the gruff but golden-hearted uncle who bankrolls the global game, you have jealous (foreign) cricket boards and their Test-loving lackeys in the (white-and-Western) press, trying to characterize Sreesanth’s misdemeanour as ‘systemic’. In this bilious narrative, the IPL is a sinful Oriental honeypot where corruption is inevitable. This isn’t reportage, this is racism. These Anglo dead-enders and their self-hating henchmen in the Indian media have a favourite word: ‘opaque’. So the IPL is evil because its ownership structure is opaque. Throw in dark mutterings about ‘benami’ or anonymous shares in the principal franchises and you can dress up unsourced speculation as investigative journalism. Is there any sporting league in the world where it’s clearer who the owners are? Shilpa Shetty, Preity Zinta, Shahrukh Khan, Nita Ambani, and so on, are on television rooting for the players they own every night of the week. Instead of the corporate anonymity typical of business, with the IPL you can literally put a face to the franchise. Unable to fault the cricket, the IPL’s critics have targeted the cheerleaders on the field and, especially, in the studio. The easy badinage that makes Extraaa Innings so deliciously different from the po-faced pre-shows that just talk cricket is condemned as male lasciviousness by killjoy critics. The best answer to this pious accusation is to ask, in what world would professionals like Navjyot Singh Sidhu and Ravi Shastri and Harsha Bhogle and Kapil Dev, role models all, with reputations to lose, use women’s bodies as cues for double entendre and innuendo? The answer is obvious: they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t even allow themselves to be complicit in someone else’s demeaning banter: they would just get up and leave. So if they aren’t doing that, it’s not happening. N. Srinivasan, the BCCI president, is a special target for dead-ender venom. Everything he does is designated nefarious. The fact that he is in charge of the BCCI and the owner of an IPL franchise is deemed a wicked conflict of interest. When Srikkanth wore two hats, one as the chief selector of the national team and the other as brand ambassador for the Chennai Super Kings, the franchise owned by Srinivasan, journalists sang the conflict-of-interest ditty like a theme song. Srinivasan’s decision to make Dhoni a vice-president of India Cements Ltd, a company he happens to own, apparently compounds this conflict-of-interest problem. This carping has got to the stage where not even a man’s business is his own business, if you see what I mean. If men are known by the company they keep, Mr Srinivasan is in very good company; Anil Kumble has had exactly the same problem with sanctimonious critics. India’s greatest bowler, its most pugnacious captain, a man who has a traffic landmark in Bangalore named after him, had his integrity called into question merely because he started up a player management company at the same time as he became president of the Karnataka State Cricket Association. He couldn’t understand the objections to this double role and the reason he couldn’t is that ‘conflict of interest’ is an arcane Western notion born of an alien business culture where everything is premised on contract, unlike India where a man’s word is his bond. Cricket is Kumble’s dharma; it’s inevitable that he will seek to involve himself in every aspect of the game. He has to be judged by what he actually does, not by some theoretical constraint upon his judgment, glibly labelled a ‘conflict of interest’. And the same courtesy must be extended to N. Srinivasan, distinguished cricket administrator, successful businessman, paterfamilias and pillar of Chennai society. ‘Conflict of interest’ as an insinuation has been used to tar the reputations of Indian cricket’s greatest commentators. Men like Ravi Shastri and Sunil Gavaskar, who have been saying the same things in unchanged sentences with iron consistency for years, are now being criticized for tailoring their views to the BCCI’s prejudices, of being the BCCI’s paid publicists. Why should pundits lucky enough to sign a contract to be the BCCI’s in-house commentators be stigmatized in this way? Why can’t we accept their explanation that the reason they agree with the BCCI on nearly everything is a coincidence rather than a sign of being compromised? Harsha Bhogle couldn’t even tweet the distinction between spot-fixing and match-fixing without following up immediately with another tweet anxiously clarifying that he saw both forms of fixing as equally culpable and bad, in case some swivel-eyed loon online thought he was carrying water for the IPL. This intemperate talk of embedded journalists and gelded commentators destroys the sacred bond between fans and broadcasters so essential to the health of the game. Can’t the critics see that it is their reflexive, corrosive suspicion that is destroying Indian cricket, not the alleged excesses of the proprietors, players and publicists of the IPL? The answer to this rhetorical question is, no, they can’t, because modern hacks hold nothing sacred, not even the cardinal principle in law that a man is innocent till proven guilty. Cowardly articles have made references to Ajay Jadeja without naming him. Jadeja has been a regular on the IPL pre-show and the self-appointed guardians of cricketing morality have insinuated that the BCCI’s willingness to accept, on its authorized telecasts, a former cricketer accused of match fixing in an earlier era is symbolic of the IPL’s fudging of past wrongdoing, its less-than-zero tolerance for corruption. The problem with this argument is that Jadeja wasn’t found guilty of match-fixing by any court in India. Ergo, by the principles of natural justice and our republic’s laws, not having been charged and convicted, he is innocent. As Sunil Gavaskar sagely said on television after the Sreesanth story broke, there should be no rush to judgment. These are wise words: if the past and precedent (and the ability of the Indian police to secure a conviction) are a guide, it isn’t just possible, it is likely that Sunnybhai might find himself some years from now sharing a commentary box with a shiny, new, exonerated Sreesanth. The IPL is a golden Ganga in spate; it gilds everything that it touches.