|
 |   |
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE |  |
Careless whispers Hearsay abounds in cricket scandal
Posted: Thursday May 04, 2000 05:34 PM
There's a game we played back in England when I was a kid. For no good reason I know it was called "Chinese Whispers."
What it involved was a group of children sitting in a circle and passing a phrase around by whispering it once in their neighbor's ear. In the classic example, a phrase that started life as "send reinforcements we're going to advance" would come back to the person who made it up as "send three and fourpence we're going to a dance."
Not a great punchline from an adult point of view I'll grant you, but as kids we thought it was a big laugh.
I mention this childhood game because Chinese Whispers is exactly what appears to be happening in the world of cricket at the moment, with rumors of discussions of claims that someone somewhere knows someone else who might have fixed a match, abounding in every corner of the globe.
The latest incident of course is the allegation against former Indian test captain, Kapil Dev, whose alleged involvement in a bribery scandal was exposed on CNN by the former president of the Indian Board of Control for Cricket, Inderjit Singh Bindra.
Now I wouldn't have a problem with Mr. Bindra's expose if he was the man actually making the claims, but he wasn't. For all his apparent credibility as a respected official, Mr. Bindra was only reporting something he'd been told by someone else. According to him, the claims against Kapil Dev had been made by the former Indian test all-rounder, Manoj Prabhakar, who, at the time of writing, had yet to come forward and endorse them himself.
Without Prabhakar's endorsement of course, and therefore in the absence of any evidence, we're only in a situation of he said, he said, he said, which is what the game of Chinese Whispers is all about.
And it doesn't stop with the Kapil Dev case either.
Just recently for example the England and Wales Cricket Board was forced to address another set of Chinese Whispers started by former test cricketer, Chris Lewis, in a newspaper article.
According to the reporter, Lewis said he knew of three England players who'd accepted bribes to affect the outcome of matches. He didn't say he was there when it happened, he just said that he'd heard about it.
Again there was a big fuss, but ultimately no substance to the claims, either because Lewis never said what it was claimed he said, or because he had no evidence to back up his statements.
Then there's the case involving former South African skipper, Hansie Cronje, who, according to South African cricket chief, Ali Bacher, admitted taking money for giving inside information related to betting, though claimed he didn't bank it.
Fair enough, he's owned up.
It's a shocking admission, but let him take his licks and let's move on. Except that in Cronje's version of the Chinese Whisper, he said he never benefited financially from any such transaction.
In fact, wherever you look in this sorry series of scandals, from the rumors that three Sri Lankan players threw a test with Australia in 1992, to the current claims against Kapil Dev, it seems most of the allegations are based on hearsay and not much more.
Don't get me wrong, I believe the guilty should be exposed and punished. But only when there's something more than tittle-tattle to support the allegations, which, in the case of cricket there often is not.
Indeed, as far as I can ascertain, and I'd like to know if you know differently, in the last decade only one incident of financial wrongdoing in cricket has so far been supported by anything substantial, and that resulted in Australia's Shane Warne and Mark Waugh being fined $12,000 by the Aussie Cricket Board for supplying bookmakers with information on match conditions during the Sri Lankan tour of 1994.
A good catch, no doubt, but not exactly a huge return for the numerous allegations that have been made is it?
And so back to the present day, where, naturally enough, Kapil Dev is planning to take legal action against Bindra and Prabhakar for putting words in his mouth he claims he never said. Which, without evidence to the contrary of course, is Chinese Whispers for grown-ups. Terry Baddoo is a co-host of "World Sport," the international sports show that airs live on CNN/Sports Illustrated and CNN International. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
| |||||||||||||||||||
