Cricket, corruption and the match-fixing that leads to murder

Written by Gavin Chait Two teams - one ranked fourth in the world, the other simply there to make up the numbers - compete in an early-stage world-cup match.  The unexpected happens: one of the weakest teams in the event beats a titan.

The coach, in horror, staggers back to his hotel.  He confronts the captain of his squad and a few of the other players.  He accuses them of deliberately throwing the match in order to get a cut of the bets.  Heated words fly.  In a fit of passion, the coach is strangled and left for dead.

Cricket is unusual in the world of big-league sports.  It is still essentially nationalised.  Unlike football, baseball, or rugby, players are not traded between privately-owned teams.  And, unlike cycling or golf, players don’t gain tremendously by creating individual successes for themselves.  Cricket is still, in style if not reality, an amateur construct where players work their way up through school and regional teams to their national side.  Once there they are at the apex and can go no further.

There will always be a national team, no matter how badly it performs, and they are protected from the consequences of their actions.  Coaches, frequently outsiders, are more likely to be sacrificed and fired for a team’s poor performance than are any of the players to be held to account.  Like a national airline, having a national cricket side is more important than having a good national cricket side.

Where businesses are treated in similar fashion, similar corruption, misrule and incompetence prevails.  There is one electricity provider in South Africa, the state-protected Eskom. With no real competition to focus business strategy, most daily attention is aimed at internal politics, scheming to increase profits while allowing the underlying infrastructure to rot, and blaming poor performance (like the current rolling power-outages) on mysterious third-forces.

The same is true of numerous state-monopolies; from Gazprom in Russia, to Airbus in Europe.

CEOs may come and go, but the central philosophy that causes the incompetence, inefficiency and all-round uselessness in the first place, are left firmly untouched.

Cricket lends itself to match-fixing.  It is a slow, high-scoring game.  Decisions do not need to be made on a hair’s-breath.  If one player should play unusually well, or unusually badly, the result can still be tweaked through subtle changes in field placement, slowing down, or speeding up play.

I remember watching Hansie Cronje placing his fielders in international matches and being confused at some of the obvious holes he was leaving.  When fours were duly struck through those holes I was annoyed, but it never occurred to me that he was doing it deliberately.  More fool me when Cronje was caught out in a match fixing scandal and then, conveniently, died without ever naming any high-level accomplices.

This column focuses on economic development.  Frequently we point out that, where the underlying framework of an economy is wrong, you cannot get economic growth, job creation and prosperity.  Cricket highlights the signal failures in economic policy.

Across the subcontinent, from Pakistan to India to Bangladesh to Sri Lanka, more than a billion people live and breathe this sport as their national game.  The players are heroes but without the financial glamour of footballers.  Billions of Dollars are bet on matches and bookies like to skew the odds in their favour.  Nothing can be simpler than to have a quiet chat with a few key players in a team; throw them some cash and ensure a result.

Steven Levitt, in his wry Freakonomics, convincingly demonstrated – using nothing but economics – how sumo matches are regularly rigged.  Horse-racing, where horses are more important than the faceless jockeys, is no less corrupt.

For cricket to regain a level of professionalism requires that the underlying problems be resolved.  National teams must be privatised.  Players should go where-ever they are paid the most.  Cricket should be modelled after the European football system.  

Otherwise cricket will come to look like another sport, long-since amusing and choreographed: professional wrestling.

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