Wilde S: Match fixing, not easy (18 Feb 95)

Few chances for purchase power to be persuasive - Simon Wilde

Simon Wilde finds it hard to determine quite how a cricket match could be fixed.

So, you want to fix an international cricket match. No questions asked. It matters not if you work for a dodgy bookmaker or a shady betting syndicate. Mum is the word. The question, though, is how to go about it?

The surest way would be to approach anyone with a role on the field, which means players and umpires. The latter have the greatest potential to influence a match and might appear the best option. As one former international player said this week as allegations of bribery against Pakistanis attempting to influence the outcome of Test matches abounded: ``All a bloke has to do (to be given out by an umpire) is get hit on the pads or play and miss one outside off stump. It might take a bad decision to give him out, but bad decisions happen. Human error.``

Yet many umpires are inured to attempts at coercion for years, they have lived with the possibility of death threats for giving the wrong man out in the wrong country and might be immune to persuasions. At the top, their careers are more assured than those of players. To buy one would be expensive.

An individual player would be cheaper, but less effective. He might be useful in providing you with the sort of details concerning tactics, selections and fitness that Dean Jones claims he was asked for, but, if you want to bring about a particular result, he will be unable to do it by himself.

Ideally, you would buy a whole team and instruct them to under-perform, but that would need a lot of money. In which case, a few leading players will have to suffice, for they know that the occasional sub-standard performance will not jeopardise their places.

``I think it certainly is possible to contrive a result by bribing two or three key players,`` Richard Hutton, the former England all-rounder, said yesterday. `` Cricket is an unpredictable game, but certain players such as spin bowlers on a turning pitch can have an important influence.

``It would perhaps be easier for a batsman to `throw` a match than a bowler, because one bad shot would be enough. A bowler would have to consistently put the ball in the `wrong` spot, and, even then, he could not guarantee that a full toss will not be hit down the throat of a fielder.``

Once you have got your players, you must select the occasion. A limited-overs match might be better than a Test match no chance of a draw, less scope for unexpected fluctuations and more games to choose from.

All this may sound implausible, but such things have happened. In the first quarter of the Nineteenth century, gambling on cricket matches was rife and so was corruption. Bookmakers would go down to Hampshire, the nursery of the game, early in the season to buy up players, or recruit them at the great cricketers` hostel, the

On one famous occasion, in 1817, players of both Nottingham and England were bought to lose the same match, Nottingham failing to do so. Some of the best players in the land were involved, notably William Lambert, who was banished from Lord`s for his part in the affair.

Such dark practices died out, according to H.S. Altham in his history of the game, because ``the number of good players was steadily on the increase, and, where it had once been enough to buy but one or two in order to make sure of a result, it was now necessary to square perhaps half a side``.

Yet Altham, writing in the 1920s, could not have anticipated that, half a century later, the game would welcome betting tents and open its doors to Kerry Packer.

Source :: The Times