IPL, Fixing, and Gangster!

Napkin, wrist band, forehead band, caps, and golden locket were once considered as on field cricketing gears for controlling the sweat, and the fashion icons respectively. Recently, it came to light that these are being used to earn the money between 20 to 80 lakhs. Courtesy, Sreesanth and company. Only thing you have to do is, keep it visible and give away only fourteen runs in an over, which is very much possible in the run-feast series, IPL T-20.

Honey.... it's a trap!!!

Just few days before the spot fixing episode took place, I had read a post on FB: "We are 100 percent confident match fixing does not exist in the IPL, it is a pure and very good entertaining soap." At that point I also agreed to it, because the way things were progressing and games were becoming exciting, there was very little doubt for the scrutiny to be put. Just three days later, the SCC group of three stooges (Sreesanth, Chandila, and Chavan) proved us wrong. Spot fixing, then over fixing, no ball fixing, match fixing, honey trap, mafia involvement, sex video, black money, all this valuable(!) information spilled out during the “AmrutManthan” of investigation.

Guess, what this signal means!!!

The IPL always remained a soft target for the tampering, the reasons: It had the mass appeal, over glamour by the association of bollywood ke sitare, undue number of matches, and lack of control as it is a domestic league. It was considered only as an entertainment tool; by that means we could call it as a three hours live crick-movie. The environment in the stadium was also decorated for the entertainment; in fact the terms were also being used as an IPL match than the cricket match. In future, it would not be surprising, if we saw a notice before the match “All the characters and incidents in this match are 'fix'itious and imaginary, resemblance to any live match is purely coincidental.”

That's called as fair play!!!

As always, BCCI took some time from its busy(?) schedule and conducted a long meeting, though the output of the meeting was futile. We can not control the bookies, a committee will be formed to investigate the episode, if the players found guilty, we would take stringent action on them, etc. The answers were hypothetical, similar to the last years; in that sense similar to the probe they had conducted during the year 2000, the Cronje episode. We all are aware, BCCI does not show any interest in the event from which there is no revenue. But if there were sponsors for the meeting, a short India- Pakistan series to reveal the action plan on how to control match fixing, a tri-series to inaugurate the annexure explaining the sentence for the guilty players involved in the match fixing, BCCI would definitely embrace these things.

The "New jersey"

This entire episode was more depressing, as the players who dared to manipulate their play were captained by the most gentleman player of the game, Dravid. Considering the way things are happening, the length and the depth of this iceberg has been getting broad, day by day. The issue having different names like spot fixing, match fixing, tampering, line and length fixing etc. etc. has been increasing the entropy of Cricket. One reference can be drawn from the movie OMG, where Mithun Chakroworthy delivered a beautiful dialogue: “Ye aastha, shraddha afeem ki tarah hoti hai, ek baar lat lag jaaye na, toh woh aasanise nahi chhutati...” This fixing fiasco has been acting like afeem and the players are getting addicted to it, the means are either the mafia or the money.


Ritesh R. Kadam
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