Butt & Co behind bars, but $50 billion illegal betting still exists

The stiff, unprecedented verdict by the English judge in the spot-fixing saga may be punctuated by moving stories of personal tragedy — Salman Butt becoming father just minutes before he is jailed for over two years and 18-year-old Mohamed Amir, the very gifted bowler from a poverty-stricken background, being “misled” all the way to a juvenile home in London — but fact remains that this ruling is appropriate, long in the coming and a huge tool for deterrence.

However, that unfortunately does not mean that the roughly estimated $50 billion illegal betting ring around cricket will die, or that the dark agents of money around the game will become less insistent in making moolah through young players. The sad fact about cricket is that it has essentially become a wantonly commercial baby, vulnerable to corruption from external agents who have been allowed to get a deep penetration into the insides of the sport.

The very fact that the illegal purveyors of dirty money have access to dressing rooms, talks hugely about the inefficacy of the International Cricket Board and its million-dollar anti-corruption unit in dealing with the issue of corruption. Even though the Anti-Corruption and Security Unit is led by a former British cop Ronnie Flangan, it has done little to insert adequate fear in playing minds against illegal options.

The Butt-Asif-Amir verdict, apt as it may be, doesn’t really go into the circumstances around the corrupt route the trio took. Though there can be no defence of personal greed and lack of values among individuals, especially ones like Butt who indulged in corruption as leaders of the game, there is one thing that needs to be said.

Butt is a product of tumult and the all-pervasive corruption endemic to his nation and that’s the reason why many in Pakistan may not understand why it should actually evoke a jail term.

Pakistani cricket has long been a baby of strife that has sadly come to signify that nation. The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has often enough been called the banana republic of cricket with many even on the inside of this cricketing board agreeing to the complete lawlessness in the administrative department. The Board has seldom protected players’ interest and has openly indulged in crass politicking at the expense of the game.

The players in Pakistan may be a fiercely gifted lot but it is often difficult for them to stand up to the ferocity of impermanence that their Board gives them back home. They are axed at the drop of a hat and reinstated without a premise. If penalised, their bans are cut short in the name of the game. If retired, they are called back if the PCB man is on their side. They are feted one moment, and dragged to court another. Their salaries are erratic and presence in the team even more transient. Over and above that, they live in an overall environment of instability which comes from Pakistan’s overall inconstancy.

Ridden by overall capriciousness, the players in Pakistan live entirely for the present and are mostly in the game not so much for the love of the sport as they are there for the money they can mint from it. It is necessary to point out here that corruption, or the vulnerability to it, is not exclusive to Pakistan — it is a worldwide phenomenon. However, what seems to draw the Pakistani cricketers more to it is the organised corruption that their nation and its leaders have seeped them in.

Also, most Pakistani players, thanks to their environment, are forced to live only for the present. This means amassing everything as fast they can, for, tomorrow in their perception is always another day when they might find themselves on the wrong side of their equally erratic Board and out of the game without a premise.

India, for example, is much more organised in its cricket administration. The contracts are long drawn out and now even domestic cricket is rewarding. Also, the players in India are much more confident of a long run in the game than their Pakistani counterparts who are in and out like a good breathing system. Hence, the instances of corruption are comparatively low.

That, however, does not take away from the fact that scams in Parliament do not happen in India — 165 legislators are in jail, which tells you how pervasive corruption is here too. A player like Mohammed Azharuddin, banned for life for sporting illegalities, is today a member of Parliament! Like most cricketing nations, except for England, India too has no concrete law against illegal betting in cricket, a law that will go a long way in curbing corrupt practices in the game.

Returning to Pakistan, I remember, during one of the tours that Pakistan took to India some years back, many of the top ranking players justified asking for money to grant interviews, even sundry quotes. “We have to earn every penny and by all means. We do not have big sponsors for all players and the only ones who make big money through endorsements are Shoaib Akhtar and Shahid Afridi. So we have to make money by these means (asking for money for interviews) and I see nothing wrong in it,” said one top ranking player without even as much as a guilty blink.

It is an environment like this one that has shaped the Butts, the Asifs and the Amirs in Pakistan. And till Pakistan remains vulnerable to bookies, the underworld and a sissy cricketing Board, not to mention a totally politics ridden chief patron, talent like this trio will continue to be felled at the altar of greed, wantonness and fearlessness to corruption that comes with the complete lack of this ulcer being a strictly punishable offence.

In that context, where players do not in some manner mind even a life ban, the jail term that has come to the young Butt, Asif and Amir will — at least for the time being — serve as a deterrent to other players across national boundaries. Till, of course, the dark agents regroup to rescript their sway over the game with means that they can yet again skirt the law, or the lack of it.

Source: The Sunday Pioneer, 6 November, 2011