Earlier watching cricket used to be simple – You support your national team, they give their best to win a match for the country, the better team on the day wins.
If your team wins, you will be happy, if they lose you will be sad. Irrespective of the result, you will keenly wait for the next match.
It stopped being so, the day, allegations of match fixing surfaced. Initially cricket lovers were dismissive of these. As more skeletons started coming out of the cupboard, everybody feared for the worst, but was hoping against hope that this will all turn out to be just a bad dream. The fears turned into reality the day Hansie Cronje confessed to his involvement with bookies. As many established players started getting engulfed in this mess, cricket lost its innocence, forever it seems. The ghost of match fixing just refuses to go away.
But some of us love this game to a fault and can’t stay without watching cricket, irrespective of who is playing whom, whether its match fixed or spot fixed! (Thanks btw to NOTW for introducing the cricket world to this wonderful(?) term called spot fixing.)
Hardly had cricket started to come out of the sordid match fixing saga, a new demon has emerged and I believe threatens the game at its root from a spectators point of view. Because now, it’s not just about the result of a match being fixed. It’s about every single ball and every single action that happens on a cricket field. If a bowler bowls a no-ball or a wide, he will be looked with suspicion. If a keeper concedes byes, he will be on the watch-list. If a batsman lets go a ball or plays a dot ball, he will be questioned.
How will a spectator know if what he is watching is real, live action on the field or some sort of a set piece where all actors involved have well rehearsed roles and are playing them to perfection? It will then just be like any so called “reality show” on television, where almost everything that happens is scripted. Twists and turns are introduced for effect, controversies are created for purpose, everything is ostensibly done to entertain the viewer.
Of course, from a player’s perspective, it will be very tempting if someone offered him thousands of dollars just to bowl a no ball, especially when the player is still very young. Because, one no-ball will hardly impact the result of a test match, which is played over 5 days and 4 innings. So, the player may think, I will bowl just one no-ball and give my best for rest of the innings. It will be his way of clearing his conscience.
The ICC and all cricket boards have to take firm steps to curb this menace before it engulfs cricket fully. For spectators who are already bored because there is too much cricket on TV, this is the last straw.
The ICC will surely not want to flash a disclaimer at the start of the proceedings that “this cricket match is a work of pure fiction and any result matching predictions by anyone is merely coincidental.”
