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A safe bet

By one reckoning of the past month, the once-highest judge in the land is either incompetent or uninterested in his brief. The stars of today's superachieving teams are little more than paid performers, staging, as it were, some sort of silly roadside rope-trick. The higher echelons of our cricket administration count a number of worthies comfortably ensconced in a resounding tradition of match-fixing, bribery, and so on. Every turn of the game, whether it is sublime on-field performance, or the addition of an also-ran to the team list, is open to question.

Does it make you wonder? Who isn't crooked?

Is Sachin Tendulkar really the greatest batsman of his, or any, time?

Are on-field deliveries the only tricks Shane Warne can turn? Who do you think will be left untouched by a proper unraveling of the ongoing scandal?

The appearance of integrity, indeed even a measure of being god-fearing, is all just so much hogwash, as l'affaire Hansie Cronje has shown. Quite simply, there is no telling. For all you and I know, the players themselves could be engineering results. At some price, anyone can be the greatest batsman, bowler, fielder, ... anything really.

The predictable round of "we'll get to the bottom of this" has begun. The sports minister is all assurance, the high courts are admitting public-interest litigations from all and sundry, and every cricket board is screaming bloody murder and vowing to unravel the heinous corruption of the game. But the truth is, we've heard all this before. To my thinking, there will be no wholesale effort to fix the image of the game, and apart from a few players against whom overwhelming evidence becomes public, no one will suffer even the mildest consequences. One more Chandrachud will write one more document, and you or I could rustle that up on a typewriter in our spare time.

Meanwhile, a combination of name-dropping and whispered campaigns will produce the next coat of whitewash on the whole thing. Take a straw poll of folks around you, and ask if they think Tendulkar is involved, ask if they think Azhar is crooked, and ask if they think Steve Waugh and Brian Lara were bought off during the magnificent Australia-WI series the last time around? If you think my finger-pointing is more such whispering, let me ask you this - who was the last player who said that in the absence of a full-fledged investigation into allegations of matchfixing, he would no longer play?

The truth is, the money's good enough that if you put in one half-way honest bloke with a bunch of paid performers going through the motions, he'll take his money and figure he earned it. That said, the inevitable conclusion is that they're all in it, that no one is above knowledge of the fixes, even if he is above participation in it. And since it can't go wholesale without administrative and umpiring collaboration as well, a few others must find themselves in the same ring as well. From Dalmiya to Dickie Bird, as it were, it's really the same story.

For those who've simply stopped following the game after Cronje took a dive, literally and figuratively, the less said of this disgrace the better. They can go back to bowling genuine dollies to their kids and watch them swing through the air in earnest, instead. At least, it's the real stuff. And for those who believe, like the UCBSA does every so often, that the next on-field performance is a great testament to putting things behind us and pressing forward with gumption, I suppose they await their turn at being even bigger fools. In time, all the usual things may well be said again. First, that those Indians can't make the case stick, and that would be the case even if you are caught with crores rolled up in your bedsheets. You can always say it's tipping money, and Chandrachud will write a stirring brief to explain how you can explain it all perfectly well.

Second, that all this wasn't such an issue before Dalmiya took over, which has its share of the truth too. Match-fixing is being exported to other countries, whether cricket is doing likewise is less obvious. So much for his globalization.

And three, this will be said, over and over again, for above all, this is true. Is it really conceivable that while members of every other team are being sought out by Indian bookies, not a single member of the Indian team would be vulnerable to such schemes? If Mark Waugh can be bought, if Hansie Cronje can be bought, why not a Srinath or Ganguly? After all, if money drives the game, and its most visible home in the cricketing world is the subcontinent, what are the chances that desi hands aren't batting from both sides of the wicket?

Don't bet against it.

Ashwin Mahesh