The Supertest final between WSC Australia and WSC World XI was also played at the SCG and attracted a further forty thousand spectators over three days. Just a week later, half that number turned out to watch the Sixth Test between Australia and England. The tide was turning against the ACB, which was also recording alarming financial losses.
So it was with great interest that I attended the annual meeting of the Professional Cricketers’ Association at Edgbaston the following April. John Arlott presided over the conference, which coincided with negotiations between the various parties in Australia nearing a critical phase. Greig spoke, and was roundly criticised – publicly at least – but the majority of professionals in the room also hoped that WSC would lead to improved salaries for county cricketers. That was certainly the thrust of Greig’s argument.
The announcement of a deal came on 30 May 1979. Not only had Channel Nine won the exclusive rights to broadcast Australian cricket for ten years, but also to promote and market the game. There was a feeling in England that the ACB had sold out – the TCCB had lost a very expensive High Court case, after all – but a solution had to be found. Australia’s Packer players were not reselected until the following domestic season, when Greg Chappell was restored as the national captain, and as a sign of a return to normality, Mike Brearley led an England team to Australia to play three Tests. However, it being a shortened series, the TCCB refused to allow the Ashes to be contested – which was just as well, as Australia won every Test – and by refusing to permit its team to wear coloured clothes in the day/night internationals, the English board made itself look positively outdated and reactionary. This delighted the Australians, ensuring that the old rivalry received a much-needed injection of hostility, and after three tumultuous and turbulent years, normal service was resumed.
For a sport that is supposed to abide firmly to a strong moral code of gentlemanly behaviour, cricket has some undeniably dubious origins. By the end of the seventeenth century, gambling was inextricably linked to the sport and there are even suggestions that the emergence of county-based cricket came as a result of gamblers forming their own teams. There are reports of a ‘great match’ held in Sussex in 1697 being played for a stake of fifty guineas per side. But cricket was not the only sport to attract gamblers, and there is no suggestion of matches in the dim and distant past being ‘thrown’ or tampered with in any way in return for a pay-off. This was certainly well before there was any spot-fixing or any of the other corrupt activities that have become the scourge of the modern game.
It was in the 1990s that the cricketing rumour mill went into overdrive with claims that international matches were being fixed by players. Perhaps it was purely coincidental that this was also the time of numerous ball-tampering allegations, but it is definitely true to say that cricket’s reputation for being a clean and ethical sport was at its lowest ebb. Subsequent investigations and inquiries have confirmed the existence of corruption, fuelled by the massive illegal bookmaking industry in India and Dubai, in particular. The South Africa captain, Hansie Cronje, and his Indian counterpart, Mohammad Azharuddin, became the first high-profile international cricketers to be banned for match-fixing. When the extent of Cronje’s involvement unravelled during the subsequent inquiry in Cape Town in 2000, led by Judge King, it became clear that cricket faced a huge problem, and that the integrity of the sport was at stake.
The first claims of match-fixing originated in county cricket. Don Topley, an Essex player, created a storm when he announced that two matches played over a weekend in 1991 between Essex and Lancashire were fixed. The deal, he claimed, was for Essex to lose the Sunday League game in return for Lancashire allowing Essex, who were in the race for the County Championship title, to win the corresponding Championship match. Topley confessed to deliberately bowling poorly in the Sunday League match when he made his allegations in 1994. There was an investigation by the TCCB and, five years later, by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and the Metropolitan Police, who found insufficient evidence to press charges despite two new witnesses supporting Topley. The inquiry by the ECB was described by some as perfunctory, and it did not appear that many on the county circuit took Topley’s claims seriously.
Australian cricket was rocked by the news that two of its favourites, Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, had both been given cash payments by an Indian bookmaker known only as John. Warne received A$5,000 and Waugh A$4,000 in exchange for what the players insist was nothing more than weather and pitch information before matches on their tour of Sri Lanka in 1994–5. An Australian journalist was tipped off that at least one Australian player was being paid by a bookmaker, and the officials were informed. Waugh and Warne admitted their involvement in unsigned handwritten statements, and the ACB chairman, Alan Crompton, fined the players. However, this was kept secret even from fellow members of the board who might have pressed for suspensions to be imposed. Another factor was that Waugh and Warne had both accused Salim Malik, the captain of Pakistan, of attempting to bribe them to lose matches and this information would have damaged their credibility as witnesses in the event of an inquiry.
But the scandal broke immediately before the Adelaide Test between Australia and England in December 1998 when Malcolm Conn, the Australian newspaper’s cricket correspondent, conducted his own investigation and published for the first time the connection with John, the mystery Indian bookie. In a packed media conference in the Adelaide pavilion, Warne and Waugh admitted to having been ‘naive and stupid’. The two players were vilified by the press and public alike, and Waugh received a hostile reception when he walked out to bat on the first day of the Test.
The initial reaction by the ACB does not come as a surprise. It was convenient in the dark decade of the 1990s for the finger of suspicion to point firmly at Pakistan. It is true that most of the rumours about corruption centred on Pakistan’s players, and their captain Salim Malik in particular. There appeared to be a determination among the game’s authorities to make an example of Malik, who in May 2000 became the first cricketer to be banned for match-fixing.
Malik’s fate was determined by Justice Malik Qayyum, a Pakistani judge, who was appointed by the Pakistan Cricket Board to examine allegations of corruption against members of the Pakistan team. In Qayyum’s report, Salim Malik was found guilty of match-fixing in Sri Lanka in 1994–5 and attempted match-fixing in Australia in 1994, and banned for life. Ata-ur-Rehman was also banned for life for ‘general match-fixing’. Other penalties were imposed on some of the best-known Pakistan cricketers. Wasim Akram was found ‘not to be above board’ and fined £3,700. Waqar Younis was censured and fined £1,200, as was Inzamam-ul-Haq. The leg-spinner Mushtaq Ahmed, who became England’s spin-bowling coach, was fined £3,700. Six years later, Qayyum admitted that he had been lenient on some players, including Wasim Akram, because he had a soft spot for them and was a fan.
The scale of corruption within cricket only surfaced for the first time when the shocking news broke that Hansie Cronje, a man who in South Africa would be ranked only one division below Nelson Mandela in terms of popularity and standing, was suspected of match-fixing. The source was the Delhi police force, which, in April 2000, made public the details of a taped telephone conversation between Cronje and a known bookmaker, Sanjay Chawla. Cronje initially denied the allegations but quickly admitted his guilt in exchange for immunity from prosecution in South Africa. The Indian captain, Mohammad Azharuddin, was also seriously implicated and they both received life bans from the game. During the King Commission of Inquiry, details emerged of Cronje’s largely unsuccessful attempts to corrupt a number of his team-mates. Depressingly, these were generally the most vulnerable, either through race or by being on the fringe of selection, and therefore the easiest to influence. Henry Williams, a black pace bowler, testified that he was offered US$15,000 to bowl badly in a one-day international against India, and Herschelle Gibbs, the opening batsman, the same amount to score fewer than 20 runs. As a result of the evidence, both players were fined and suspended by the South African board for six months.
From an English perspective, the most absorbing details to emerge centred on a rain-affected Test match played between South Africa and England at Pretoria in January 2000. At the start of the last day of the final Test, only forty-five overs had been
