Just not cricket?

| TLS

31/07/13 7:00 PM

The leading international forum for literary culture

Just not cricket?

Stephen Fay
A sis Nandy, a reputable Indian sociologist, likes the game so well that he declares Indians were the real inventors of cricket. It is an Indian game, he says, accidentally discovered by the British. This magnificent conceit appears in Nandys The Tao of Cricket (1989), in which he argues that slow-burning drama and endless digressions reveal an intrinsic relationship between cricket and ancient Hindu culture. He compares the pace and rhythm of the game to the interminable Indian epic, the Mahabharata; and asserts that the Indians did not merely acquire the game of their colonial occupier in some deep cultural sense, they owned it all along. But The Tao of Cricket was published when Tests were the unchallenged form of international cricket competition. Since then, endless television coverage, particularly of one-day games, has brought cricket to an exuberant Indian audience of around 160 million. India might not, in fact, have invented the game, but they now own it. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is the most powerful in international cricket. Gideon Haigh, a distinguished cricket historian, observes that this is more than a power shift; it is a change in the nature of power. Cricket has joined the recently formed and rapidly expanding Sports-Industrial complex. This is a world of commerce, and nothing defines the change more clearly than the Indian Premier League (IPL), in which nine cricket teams owned by rich businessmen play matches of twenty overs a side (Twenty20), a form of the game unquestionably invented in England, in 2003. Corruption is, of course, a natural accompaniment of such wealth and power. Stir it in, and what James Astill and Ed Hawkins are describing is a whole new ball game.

James Astill THE GREAT TAMASHA Cricket, corruption and the turbulent rise of modern India 290pp. Wisden Sports Writing. 18.99. 978 1 4081 5692 6 Ed Hawkins BOOKIE GAMBLER FIXER SPY A journey into the heart of crickets underworld 232pp. Bloomsbury. 16.99 (US $32.50). 978 1 4081 6995 7
Published: 24 July 2013

Mahendra Singh Dhoni, April 14, 2012 Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images

Astill sought out the Nawab of Pataudi shortly before his death in 2011. One of Indias finest captains, he was briefly sucked into the frenzy of the IPL, but fell out of sympathy with the baggage that accompanied it the music, fireworks, lights and dancing girls, he said. That is what Indians call tamasha , the Hindi for entertainment. Pataudi found the IPL too noisy, producing not very good cricket, and in thrall to the wealth of the new Indian economy. I went to the wrong school, Pataudi remarked. They didnt teach us to make money at Winchester. Astill tells expertly the story of the enthusiastic adoption of cricket in India; in fact, a slice of it is in his genes. His grandfather Ewart Astill played in the first representative game between India and MCC in 1926. There had been great Indian batsmen such as Ranjitsinhji and Duleepsinhji, who played in England and considered themselves English cricketers, but a splendid hundred by an Indian army officer named C. K. Nayudu persuaded the English that Indian cricket should be taken more seriously. India first sent a team to England in 1932; those early touring teams were financed by maharajahs, who, unlike Pataudi, were hopeless cricketers. After Independence, their role was taken over by commercial patronage, and the game run by politicians. Sponsorship
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After Independence, their role was taken over by commercial patronage, and the game run by politicians. Sponsorship by companies such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi brought in billions of dollars. It is no coincidence that Indias current captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who is ranked only fortieth among the worlds best batsmen, is at around 25 million a year one of the highest paid sportsmen in the world. Astill observes, however, that the money does not trickle down. The BCCI spend only small sums on providing pitches and equipment for the poor and deprived lovers of the game, which remains principally a middle-class pursuit. Astill, who was Delhi Correspondent for The Economist , found that cricket brought him closer to India. He travelled the subcontinent interviewing everyone who counts in Indian cricket, and many more who dont. For example, in Rajkot he met a railway worker called Arvind Pujara, who coached children on a dilapidated ground belonging to the railways. His best pupil was his son, Cheteshwar. Starting when the boy was four, Arvind concentrated on getting him to play with a straight bat in the classical manner. He was well enough taught to make his first-class debut at sixteen and win his first Indian cap at twenty-one. England discovered him last winter in Ahmedabad when he scored 206 not out. Wisden declared the elegant Pujara to be the engine of the Indian middle order. His proud father said his son had had the worst facilities in India, but the best record. Astills sympathy for the poor is a recurrent theme. In Dharavi, one of Mumbais worst slums, he found skinny young boys whose job was to decorate silken saris, and whose day off was spent watching cricket on television. It is the only culture they share with the elite of corrupt politicians, tycoons and film stars who run the IPL. In the six years of its existence, they have transformed international cricket and reflected a profound change in the Indian economy. Vijay Mallya, a booze magnate from Bangalore, boasts that they have transitioned India from a saving economy into a spending economy. Young generations of Indians have become consumers. Forget about ancient Hindu culture, and listen to the marketing men. The IPL is the brainchild of Lalit Modi, son of a sugar baron. He had a flair for business and an appetite for risk. The teams were to bear the names of Indian cities, and franchises would be auctioned. Bids were so high that only tycoons in industries such as cement, construction, liquor, media and Bollywood could afford to play. The franchise auction raised no less than $732.5 million. Television rights sold for more than $1 billion. Players received unheard-of sums for a short season in April and May. Dhoni fetched 1.5 million, more even than Sachin Tendulkar, one of the top five batsmen ever to have played the game. It was madness, says Astill, and absolutely compelling. The IPL was a sensation. Players had complained for years that they were playing too much cricket, but they had no objection to increasing the workload when so much was to be earned so quickly. The game emphasized the skills of batsmen, who were expected to thrash six after six. Bowlers, who are limited to four overs each, lose out. Astill admits he found that many of the games he watched were rubbish, but adds that for millions of viewers it is the cricket of their dreams, purest tamasha . A disenchanted former Indian player compares the IPL to pornographic films: OK for a bit, but how long can you watch bonking? As dedicated men of business, the owners of IPL franchises believe that, like all consumer products, the IPL needs to freshen itself up. This process began with the dismissal of Modi, a charming man who had succumbed to a dreadful case of hubris. In a damning commentary on English county cricket, one IPL owner remarks: We dont want to end up with no one watching in the stadium, as if its Lancashire against Sussex. One solution is to make the League a year-round business. They need the consent of the BCCI, but Astill suggests that would be forthcoming. Indians want still more tamasha . Perhaps because of his own love of India, Astill makes his case when he says that India is the gravest threat to crickets precious traditions, but then undermines it by saying that it is hard to be disapproving because, for the poor, the game is a consolation, and they deserve the cricket they most want. An early generation of writers on The Economist would have dismissed this as mawkish nonsense, and concentrated instead on Indias malign threat to Test cricket. So boring, some IPL owners told Astill. Tests are where the essence of cricket is to be found (as Englands 14-run win at Trent Bridge in the Ashes series recently demonstrated). That is one damaging charge against Indian cricket, but there is another, which undermines the legitimacy of the game itself. Gambling on cricket takes place in all cricket-playing countries, but nowhere on the same scale as in India. Despite the efforts of the International Cricket Councils Anti-Corruption Squad, corruption remains endemic. Only this spring, match-fixing allegations have been made against a flamboyant Indian fast bowler, Sreesanth, and two colleagues in the Rajasthan Royals IPL team; and Mohammad Ashraful, a former captain of Bangladesh, has been accused of losing at least two matches in Bangladeshs own Premier League. Initially, cricket was organized by eighteenth-century English aristocrats to give them a chance to gamble their fortunes away. When the Marylebone Cricket Club became the arbiter of the spirit and the rules of cricket in the
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fortunes away. When the Marylebone Cricket Club became the arbiter of the spirit and the rules of cricket in the nineteenth century, gambling went into hibernation. It was revived, largely after the popularization of one-day cricket in the 1980s, especially in India, where it expanded at the same rate as the Indian economy. The fact that gambling is illegal in India seems irrelevant, and it appears to have become an important income stream for mafia bosses in India, Pakistan and Dubai. Because it is illegal, much of what is written about it is speculative. In Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy Lalit Modi himself tells Ed Hawkins, Spot-fixing is rife in the game. And Im talking globally; its a Pandoras Box. Its staring you straight in the face, but difficult to prove, almost impossible to prove. Hawkins spent time in India with bookmakers he had tempted to talk to him by emailing them tips about the English weather and pitches that might help them make their odds. He learned about the main varieties of betting on cricket, all known as spot-fixing: the lunch favourite bets on the number of runs scored before lunch; the lambi on the total runs scored in an innings; brackets are a bet on the number of runs scored in specific segments, say of ten overs. The bookies work in crowded rooms dominated by televisions and heavy black suitcases, each half of which holds thirty mobile phones: an essential requirement of illegal betting. A clerk shouts the odds down phones and records bets on A4 lined pads. The bookies Hawkins got to know were middlemen passing a large proportion of the profit to mafia men in Mumbai. Their cost structure covers the cost of bribes to the local police. The Indian police are not completely passive, however. A Delhi police investigation in 2000 exposed Hansie Cronje, South Africas captain, as a match-fixer, and the same investigation revealed that Mohammad Azharuddin, Indias captain and one of its most polished batsmen, had thrown three one-day games. Despite the odds against him, Hawkins has written a brave book in which he tries to identify some of the matches that have been fixed. The World Cup semi-final in 2010 between India and Pakistan became an obsession. He was confident that Englands win against Sri Lanka in Cardiff in 2011 was fixed, and also a forty-over game between Sussex and Kent in 2011. English county games are of interest in India because they appear on television, and the one castiron case of fixing led to the conviction in England of an Essex bowler, Mervyn Westfield, for accepting 6,000 to concede at least twelve runs in his first over of a one-day game. He was sentenced to four months. But, to the frustration of the reader, never mind the author, the evidence for all the other allegations is stubbornly circumstantial. Oddly, Hawkins is most convincing about the most famous of all recent cases of fixing. Pakistans captain, Salman Butt, and two talented fast bowlers were entrapped by the News of the World into accepting 150,000 to bowl no balls at agreed stages of the innings in a Test against England at Lords in 2010. The News of the World claimed that this was the biggest story in its history; all three were convicted and jailed. Ed Hawkins is contemptuous. He insists that no Indian bookie would take a bet on the timing of a no ball. The newspaper actually confirmed a less absorbing truth: that Pakistani cricketers are susceptible to corruption. We knew that. There remains a great deal that we dont.

Stephen Fay is writing about the Ashes this summer for the Business Spectator of Melbourne, Australia. His book Tom Graveney at Lords: A year at the home of cricket was published in 2005.

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