Not cricket

The truth is some cricketers have always been prepared to resort to sneaky ploys to gain an edge. 

But the sport was truly shaken to its foundations by an incident at the turn of the millennium. Throughout the 1990s, Hansie Cronje was the captain and poster boy of South African cricket. He was even courted by Nelson Mandela, who used the colonial games of rugby and cricket to cement the bonds of the new rainbow nation through shared pride in multi-racial sporting prowess. 

Then, in April 2000, Cronje was charged with match-fixing: accepting bribes from Indian bookmakers to lose games intentionally. Cronje’s fall from grace was total. When he eventually confessed, he was banned from cricket for life. (Tragically, it was a short ban, as he died in a plane crash two years later.) 

But the scandal also cast doubt on the whole future of the professional game. Once you lose trust that all players will compete to the best of their ability, why would you spend good money to go and watch? Why would television companies spend millions to secure coverage – or sponsors to associate themselves with players? 

And the trust wasn’t just lost in every game, but in every moment of every game. Cricket is blessed with a bewildering variety of statistics. Punters can bet not just on the outcome of the match, but on the number of runs made by a team or a batter, which batter will be out next, which bowler takes most wickets. You can even wager on the coin toss at the beginning of the match, or whether a team opts to bat or bowl first. 

In 2010, after a newspaper exposé of illegal betting, two Pakistani bowlers and their captain were found to have conspired to bowl no-balls (illegal deliveries) at pre-determined points of the game. This sort of illegal betting on a segment of the game, rather than its result, is known as spot-fixing. All three were banned from cricket for years and received prison sentences after a criminal investigation.  

Perhaps these scandals should have come as no surprise. If cricket’s laws are complex, so too is the game’s governance.

Perhaps these scandals should have come as no surprise. If cricket’s laws are complex, so too is the game’s governance. 

Cricket was originally run from London by the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), which to this day retains responsibility for – and copyright to – the laws of cricket. For many years, it also ran England’s national team. Nowadays, the global game is run by the International Cricket Council (ICC), which governs international competitions for all forms of the game, like the world cups, and appoints the umpires and referees. However, international matches between two nations are managed by their respective cricket boards, which are also responsible for running all domestic competitions at every level of the game. And there is a massive financial imbalance between these national cricket boards. Cricket is like a religion in India, and the wealth of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) dwarfs its counterparts, even in the traditional cricketing strongholds of England and Australia, giving it massive clout within the game. This level of decentralisation makes it easier for bad actors to take advantage of chinks in the governance armour, akin to regulatory arbitrage in the corporate world.

Complicating matters further, betting is illegal in some nations on the Indian subcontinent. That has helped spawn a massive and murky bookmaking black market, which is hard to investigate.

After the Cronje scandal, the ICC established its Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (ACSU), led by an ex-Metropolitan Police Commissioner. During the early years, the ACSU was seen as underfunded and ineffective. It doesn’t help that its jurisdiction is limited to international fixtures, only investigating or monitoring domestic leagues when it is invited to do so. 

The ACSU really kicked into gear after the Pakistani spot-fixing crisis. Since then,  it has undoubtedly helped clamp down on match fixing in international matches. The players are now paid enough to be less susceptible to bookies’ enticements, and there are strict rules on dressing room conduct and access, as well as in-depth training for players on the potential pitfalls. 

Certainly, the game has not gone into decline. Far from it: a range of new national competitions with different formats and more razzamatazz has attracted a younger, wider audience. At the same time, women’s cricket has surged in popularity, attracting more participants, television contracts and money.

A surge in popularity, baffling complexity, a proliferation of innovative products, a smattering of devious behaviour, sketchy governance: the parallels won’t be lost on anyone familiar with the cryptocurrency arena. Of course, before crypto became seen as a low-effort path to a Lamborghini, a large part of its appeal was precisely that it was beyond the control of governments and central banks that were seen as incompetent or corrupt, imperilling the value of fiat currencies. 

But the lack of regulation left the door open for bad actors. Just as less experienced cricket players may be groomed by bookies to fix matches, retail investors – typically less financially literate than their institutional counterparts – may be more susceptible to market manipulation, misinformation or outright fraud. Regulators, especially in the US, have woken up to the need for robust governance frameworks around the cryptocurrency ecosystem. FTX ‘Crypto King’ Sam Bankman-Fried and, more recently, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao have been found to have exploited the lack of governance controls and compliance oversight of their cryptocurrency exchanges.

But the lack of regulation left the door open for bad actors.

In any collective human undertaking, there will always be a tension between those who play by the rules and those who game the system. Cricket is no exception. Robust governance and strong management is key to both rooting out any malpractice and fostering the integrity which should underpin fans’ and players’ trust in the game.