Cricket: No smoke without ... more smoke

By Richard Boock

Apologies to Benjamin Franklin, but the only certainties in life these days seem to be death, taxes ... and match-rigging allegations in cricket.

The idea of the sport being a funny game has taken on a whole new meaning over the past few years, but if it was half as corrupt as some people imagine, most of the world's cricketers would have to be bent.

It's only a couple of months since Stephen Fleming created history by becoming the first New Zealand captain to be offered money to lose a game of cricket, providing a subtle variation on the previous arrangement when we quite happily did it for free.

The incident might have been held up to illustrate the massive difference between attempting to fix a game of cricket and succeeding in fixing one - let alone the difficulties involved in managing the result - but instead has been used as more anecdotal evidence of a contamination within the game.

If you believe everything you hear, that is.

The rumour-mill was busy again this week as New Zealand levelled the Pepsi Cup series in India, with New Delhi official Sunil Dev claiming he was told by an un-named bookmaker two weeks previously that the series would go down to a decider.

That's the way it works these days. Someone claims he's been privy to a conspiracy, and the next thing you know every cricket-following nation in the world is smelling a scandal.

Where there's smoke there's, well ... more smoke.

There were suggestions of match-fixing during the Asian Championship earlier this year, more after the World Cup final when Pakistan were overwhelmed by Australia, and the most recent allegations came after New Zealand beat an understrength India by 48 runs at Guwahati Dev, a former Indian cricket board vice-president, said he was worried that bookmakers could so accurately predict how a series would unfold. His comments were dismissed by BCCI secretary Jaywant Lele as the product "of someone's imagination."

The suggestions also attracted a response from Fleming, who surely spoke for most cricket followers when he said he was "sick and tired" of unsubstantiated bribery claims every time a match took an unexpected twist.

Fleming said Dev's claims that the one-day series against India might have been fixed were "rubbish", and that he was fed up with rumours of corruption whenever there was an unexpected result.

"To be honest, I'm getting a little bit sick and tired of assumptions being made by people who are ill-informed and cannot read a game," he said last night.

"It's pretty disappointing that in most games where there's an upset result all this flies about. It's pretty sad and it's something we have to get rid of."

He said he had not seen anything during the series in India to suggest that any match could have been thrown, and questioned whether it could be done in any case.

"`Firstly, how would you do it?'' he asked. "And secondly, I've come to know the Indian players reasonably well over the past two years, and I don't know of anyone who would do that."