The unexpected shock spilled over in the South African press in 2000 after Hansie Cronje fell from “hero to zero”[/caption]
In our Wednesday regular “Not Just Sports” this week, we said “cricket and betting have been snug bedfellows since 1646!” We said so quoting the Hansie Cronje affair in 2000 that was considered the darkest of times for a sport thought to be the most noble.
“When the scandal broke, cricket was considered to have lost its virtue. Whether it had any to start with is debatable,” asked Ed Hawkins in his startling 2012 book, “Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy – A journey to the heart of cricket’s underworld”.
The Indian Premier League (IPL) 2021 is on now and has already raised many an eyebrow over the sequence of some of the dozen of games that are over. What we see here is fascinating, unpredictable, “cricket lovely cricket” or else, some sort of a drama enacted according to a smartly designed script?
It is in such a context that we, on request of many of our readers, reproduce here the first chapter titled “There is nothing new under the sun” in the above Hawkins book published by Bloomsbury.
Oxford Street, London. Late September 2010. The browsers, bargain hunters and tourists fill the pavements in their hordes. The windows of their basilicas – Niketown, Topshop, Benetton et al – reflect a thousand eager faces a minute. To stop and be swallowed by the greedy throng is to risk a bruising to the knees from the swinging of oversized shopping bags or to the ribs from the jutting lenses of daytrippers’ cameras.
If you are ever unfortunate enough to find yourself carried along by this wave of consumerism on London’s busiest street, do try to dig in your heels, hold back the tide, accept the inevitable bumps and barges and reflect. For this is the incongruous, somewhat surprising setting for the first and, it was hoped, last act of the story of match-fixing in cricket.
Where Oxford Street and Argyll Street meet is a small bureau de change.
Apt really. More than 150 years ago it was the site for the Green Man and Still pub, an establishment notorious for being the place where cricketers would meet bookmakers. Money would change from one grubby hand to the next for fixes. And somewhere along this stretch of retail gluttony, which runs east to west from the landmark of Centre Point’s reach-for-the-skies tower to the green tranquillity of Hyde Park, is a clothes shop owned by Sanjay Chawla, the bookmaker who was recorded by Delhi police fixing matches with Hansie Cronje, the disgraced South Africa captain, in 2000.
The Cronje affair was the darkest of times for a sport thought to be the most noble. When the scandal broke, cricket was considered to have lost its virtue. Whether it had any to start with is debatable. Cricket and betting have a long, rich history, having been snug bedfellows since 1646, the earliest reference to gambling on the sport: a court case concerning the non-payment of a wager made on a game at Coxheath in Kent on 29 May of that year. The stake? Twelve candles.
In the early 18th century, cricket was financed by the aristocracy for the precise reason that they could gamble on it. Every match that was considered important, whether it was a first-class game or a single wicket competition, was played for money. Newspapers of the time did not report the scorecards and results of these contests, but did record the odds and who won the wager. In 1744 the first set of laws for the game were drawn up, specifically to settle gambling disputes.
It was in those days of yore that cricket was first introduced to what could be considered the precursor to the spot-bet: the act of betting on a happening other than the match result. In 1757, Lord March, a compulsive gambler, won money by putting a letter inside a cricket ball and persuading cricketers to throw it to one another over fixed distances. He had wagered that he could propel a letter a certain distance in a certain amount of time.
Then there was the 4th Earl of Tankerville, who had such faith in his gardener’s metronomic ability as a bowler that he bet £100 – a huge sum in those days – that he could land the ball on a feather. He duly did so.
So cricket, riddled with the spirit of gambling, was ripe for corruption. It was in a book called The Cricketer’s Fields, written by Reverend Pycroft, that this foul play was first laid bare. Pycroft frequented the Green Man and Still and became close to a number of players. For the taped mobile telephone conversations between Cronje and Chawla, read the conversation Pycroft had with an anonymous player about the fraternisation of cricketers with bookmakers, tricksters and blacklegs.
‘All the names I had ever heard as foremost in the game met together, drinking, card-playing, betting and singing at the Green Man,’ said the player. ‘No man without his wine and such suppers as three guineas a game to lose, five to win could never pay for long.’ Pycroft included these quotes in his book and in doing so published the first account of corruption in cricket. The year was 1851.
Pycroft had an interview with Billy Beldham, the Surrey batsman who in 1997 was named as one of the hundred greatest cricketers of all time by John Woodcock, the esteemed former cricket correspondent of The Times.
But Beldham too fixed a match, trying to make up for money lost in a previous fix that had gone awry, telling Pycroft: ‘Matches were bought and matches were sold and gentlemen, who meant honestly, lost large sums of money, till the rogues beat themselves at last. Of this roguery, nobody ever suspected me.
‘Hundreds of pounds were bet upon all the great matches, and other wagers laid on the scores of the finest players. And that too by men who had a book for every race and every match in the sporting world – men who lived by gambling.’
The anonymous source and Beldham reveal the key ingredients of fixing: greed, poverty and drink, of which the Green Man had plenty.
Cricketers would be bought booze by the bookmakers, loosening their tongues and inhibitions before suggesting they throw a match for money.
‘The temptation was really very great – too great by far for any poor man to be exposed to,’ said Pycroft’s contact. ‘What was easier than for such sharp gentlemen to mix with the players, to take advantage of their difficulties, and to say, “Your backers, my Lord this, and the Duke of that, sell matches and overrule all your good play, so why shouldn’t you have a share of the plunder?” – that was their constant argument – serve them as they serve you.’
The Cronje of this era was a player called William Lambert – some say Pycroft’s chief source – who was found guilty of match-fixing and banned from playing at Lord’s for life. Lambert was described by Arthur Haygarth, another notable player of the time, as ‘one of the most successful cricketers that has ever yet appeared, excelling as he did in batting, bowling, fielding, keeping wicket, and also single wicket playing’. The Cricketer’s Fields coined the phrase ‘it’s just not cricket’ and its revelations forced the MCC to act. Bookmakers, who previously could have been found sitting under the pavilion, ready to take a gambler’s money, were banned from Lord’s. The Green Man and Still became a parcel office for the London and North-Western Railway.
Cricket unravelled in similar fashion during the 1990s. It began in 1990 when Mukesh Gupta, the bookmaker who would furnish India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) with damaging information on the depth of corruption, first became involved with the India player Ajay Sharma. Gupta (who was eventually cleared of all criminal charges by the Delhi High Court in February 2011 in relation to the Cronje match-fixing scandal) would meet Mohammad Azharuddin, the India captain, in 1995. A year later Azharuddin and Cronje would both take bribes from the man known as ‘MK’ during reciprocal tours between South Africa and India. Elsewhere, Pakistan was conducting its own inquiry into corruption claims about Salim Malik, the former captain who received a life ban for match-fixing in 2000 that was later lifted by a local court of Lahore in October 2008. And in Australia, it had emerged that Shane Warne and Mark Waugh had been fined for taking money from a bookmaker.
[caption id="attachment_131302" align="alignleft" width="410"]
On 13 February last year, the primary suspect of the 2000 match-fixing scandal Sanjay Chawla was extradited from the UK to India[/caption]
But it was the Cronje case which compelled. It was not clear how Sanjay Chawla became involved with Cronje, but Clive Lloyd, the manager of the West Indies team, claimed to have seen him in a VIP box during his team’s tour to South Africa in 1998-99. When Delhi police released the Cronje tapes, recorded during the Pepsi one-day series in March 2000, Chawla was a key figure. A sample from those tapes reads as follows:
Sanjay Chawla: ‘Is [Pieter] Strydom playing?’
Hansie Cronje: ‘Yes he is playing. Yeah.’
Chawla: ‘[Nicky] Boje?’
Cronje: ‘Boje is playing.’
Chawla: ‘And who is playing? [Herschelle] Gibbs?’
Cronje: ‘Gibbs and myself.’
Chawla: ‘Yeah, what about anybody else?’
Cronje: ‘No, I won’t be able to get any more.’
Chawla: ‘You won’t be able to get more?’
Cronje: ‘No.’
Chawla: ‘OK, just tell me. But you have only four with you and not anybody else?’
Cronje: ‘No.’
Chawla: ‘[Lance] Klusener and no one?’
Cronje: ‘No, no, impossible, impossible. They were saying that they were already doing Cochin. The other guys are already angry with me because I have not received their money you know.’
Chawla: ‘But I told you I have already given him altogether 60.’
Cronje: ‘OK.’
Chawla: ‘And tomorrow I can deposit the money in your account, it is not a problem because of the time difference. Tomorrow itself I can deposit the money.’
Cronje: ‘OK. Everything is fine. Spoken to Gibbs and to [Henry]
Williams and Strydom. Everything is fine.’
Chawla: ‘And how many runs for Gibbs?’
Cronje: ‘Less than 20.’
Chawla: ‘Less than 20?’
Cronje: ‘Yeah.’
Chawla: ‘And if you score 270 it is off?’
Cronje: ‘OK, and financially the guys want 25. They want 25 each.’
Chawla: ‘All right, OK.’
Cronje: ‘So that’s 75 for those three and what can you pay me? I do not know how much you pay me.’
Chawla: ‘You say.’
Cronje: ‘If you give me 140 for everybody.’
Chawla: ‘140 altogether?’
Cronje: ‘Yeah.’
Chawla: ‘OK, that’s fine.’
Cronje: ‘All right. So we definitely are on.’
Chawla: ‘OK, and one last thing I want to ask you, you know just in case India bat first and if they get out for less than 250 and when you come to bat in the second innings, is it possible you could ask Gibbs to? His wicket? … Maybe we can get out of it.’
Cronje: ‘OK.’
Chawla: ‘And just in case India is all out for less that 250 if they bat first.’
Cronje: ‘OK, I will tell him.’
Chawla: ‘Yeah.’
Cronje: ‘I will tell him.’
Chawla: ‘And because if he starts scoring so early then we won’t be able to get out of it.
Cronje: OK. Not so early in the first five or six in the Indian innings.’
Chawla: ‘Yeah.’
Cronje: ‘OK.’
On the basis of such evidence Cronje was banned for life in October 2000, following South Africa’s King Commission. Gibbs and Williams were banned for six months, Boje and Strydom, who under oath both denied ever having been involved in fixing, were both exonerated. A month later the CBI published its report following the allegations made by MK Gupta. Azharuddin and Ajay Sharma were banned for life, Manoj Prabhakar and Ajay Jadeja for five years. The ICC still hold Azharuddin’s ban although a high court in India ruled it illegal. Jadeja was eventually cleared by the Delhi High Court. Also in 2000, Pakistan’s Qayyum Report was released. Life bans for Salim Malik (although his sanction was later overturned by a Lahore court in 2008) and Ata-ur-Rehman (his life ban was lifted by the ICC in November 2006) followed, while Wasim Akram was fined and barred from captaining his country. Rehman was later allowed to play again from 2007. The purge was complete. Apparently for the second time in its history, cricket had cut out the cancer.
Does it need to perform emergency surgery for a third time? This was the question I had on my mind when I stood outside that small bureau de change, the ghosts of the Green Man sending a chill down the spine. Billy Beldham’s parting shot to Pycroft was ringing in my ears, too: ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.’
The sport was reeling. The International Cricket Council (ICC) had just suspended three Pakistan players, Mohammad Amir, Mohammad Asif and Salman Butt, on corruption allegations relating to spot-fixing. A News of the World investigation had alleged the players, at the behest of an agent called Mazhar Majeed, bowled no-balls at pre-determined times during the Lord’s Test against England that summer. Lengthy playing bans for each of the men followed and, for the first time, cricketers were convicted in a court of fixing, or to use the legal parlance, ‘conspiracy to accept corrupt payments, and conspiracy to cheat at gambling’. Butt, the former Pakistan captain, was sentenced to two years and six months, Asif got a one-year jail sentence and Amir, his fellow bowler, six months. Majeed was sentenced to two years and eight months.
As a gambler and cricket fan I wanted to know more of how corruption in cricket worked, who the bookmakers were, how and where they operated, what markets they bet on, how players were targeted, what they were promised and how they were paid. How was a fix set up? How was money actually generated from a fix? Was it bookmakers manipulating odds? Was it punters placing bets? The spot-fixing case involving the Pakistan players had not answered any of these questions. There were confusing and contradictory elements of the case which set off a desire to understand more about a historic, thriving corrupt industry – a sort of personal version of The Cricketer’s Fields.
Sanjay Chawla could perhaps provide answers to my questions.
Originally from Delhi, Chawla had lived in London since 1993, running his garment shop. He had learned the trade from the family business which had been set up in 1953, originally in Jangpura. Year by year it had grown, until by the end of the century more than 25,000 shorts, trousers, jackets and pullovers were being produced on a daily basis. His store, apparently, was inauspicious, selling cheap non-Indian clothing. ‘The ambiance of the store does not give the impression of Chawla being a man who can trade in thousands of pounds,’ it was said at the time of the Cronje case.
So on that Oxford Street afternoon I went door to door, seeking him out at each of the shops which best matched the description. ‘Does Sanjay Chawla work here?’ Eleven times I asked the question, most of the time receiving a shake of the head or blank stares. Twice I was told to ‘wait here’ as the assistant went to the backroom from where I believed Chawla would materialise. But he did not. The worker returned with a blank face and I was on my way.
Two weeks later I came across Chawla’s mobile telephone number. It rang three times before an irritated voice answered.
‘Hello, Sanjay? … Sanjay Chawla?’
‘Yes, who is this?’
I explained who I was and that I wanted to talk to him about cricket and betting.
‘You’ve got the wrong number,’ he said and hung up.
Chawla has never spoken of his past, apparently sleeping in his car to avoid reporters. I sent a text message a day for about a week, hoping he would agree to ‘meet for ten minutes for a coffee’. He did not reply.
Of course, I was being lazy. I thought a stroll down Oxford Street on a pleasant late summer day would satisfy my curiosity. In reality I would have to undergo a more arduous journey, one to the heart of cricket’s underworld. In the end I believe I got the answers to my questions and a lot more besides.
I hope this book will explain how corruption in cricket works and that the answers to my questions will interest the reader as much as they have interested me. I’ve met with India’s illegal bookmakers, stayed in their homes, eaten with their families, watched them take bets, been coerced into giving them information which could have landed me in trouble with the ICC’s Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (ACSU), received details about fixes before they have happened, drunk beer at TGI Friday’s with one of India’s most infamous punters, had sweets and chai with a fixer who pleaded his innocence, met the Delhi police who interrogated Mohammad Azharuddin and spoken with spies in Pakistan’s intelligence agency. After all of it, I will never watch a cricket match in the same way again.