By Biswaraj Pattnaik, October 7, 2015 : India and South Africa played a T20 cricket match at Barabati Stadium in Odisha’s silver city Cuttack on the World Habitat Day i.e on October 5, 2015, which finished shamefully because the Odisha crowd did not like Indians vanquished. The South Africans kept pounding the over-confident Indians right in front of the crowd which did not go well with the victory-seeking unruly crowd.

They hurled bottles and other garbage missiles to hurt players and other officials in the field so violently that the authorities had to stop the game and have the spectators evacuated to finish the match on a very sad note.

It is now clear that Barabati stadium shall be banned from hosting respectable cricket matches at least for two years. Most shamefully, the stadium became terribly filthy with garbage ‘missile litter’ on the ‘Habitat Day’ on which the citizens of the world pledge to keep the environment clean to have their dwelling places kept healthy. The authorities too had forgotten the significance of the cleanliness discipline. Obviously people were not fittingly frisked at the entry points.

It is not untrue that Cricket has long since become a mad, unethical and dirty game on all scores. The original cricket, started in the 16th century, had become officially international in 1877. Twenty-two gentlemen, all in white, gathered and thirteen of them walked into the field with gay abandon as if they had the whole clock ticking at their will. Cricketers never displayed haste.

Everything used to be easy, cool and casual. Ordinary mortals in the British colonies never played cricket. They did not have access to bats, balls, stumps, or for that matter, the basic knowledge and skills. Most children played with nature as companion – climbing trees, swimming in the rivers and ponds, throw-games aplenty, with balls of all shapes and sizes, launching marbles with fingers, making tops swing frighteningly, tugging at ropes and jumping and sprinting and so on.

Football or soccer too was so easy with only a single ball to chase and sweat out on. Cricket was for long known as a lazy, elite class game. Until the advent of cable television, life was free of cricket in the South Asian region, except on rare urban locations. The game remained limited to test and county matches, mostly ending in bizarre draws. The Indian princes and the aristocrats played the game to please the colonial masters. Raja Ranjitsingji, the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar (now Jamnagar) fell in love and mastered cricket so well that history book contains him as the most entertainingly effortless player of the times.

No wonder, the ‘Ranji trophy’ is the most prestigious cricket tournament of India. Those days newspapers carried cricket stories sparingly, and occasional radio commentary kept cricket live. The 50-over World Cup and the colour television came together to make cricket very popular in India around the early eighties.

Coincidentally by then, India, the underdog team had scooped the 1983 Prudential World Cup in England and the Indians began going mad from that day on. One-day International cricket, broadcast live on television, turned a passion because of the grand excitement of ‘victory or defeat.’ Boring draws were gone forever. Cricket had become fast.

The first historic thing the Indians did was to conclusively assassinate Hockey. Then they murdered Football, Volley-ball and dozens of fitness games successively. The nature-linked age-old games were merrily buried and forgotten. Skill-enhancing, no-cost games with ‘marbles’ ‘tops’ and ‘kites’ were loathed by kids as if they were meant for the untouchables only. Thus Kabbadi and other community-binding games too were discarded merrily.

The Indian sub-continent, thus, lost all the age-old games which promoted good health and community solidarity as most of them were linked to socio-religious festivals. The childhood excitement was gone forever.

Cricket is a ruthless, unkind and unscrupulous game today. Interestingly, the first limited overs match was played between England and Australia on 5, January 1971 in Melbourne after rains washed out the first three days of the third Test. It was just a circumstantial decision to finish the game happily which Australia had won by five wickets. Speed was appreciated and the One Day International match was born to stay and flourish perpetually. Twenty-20 cricket emerged later as a faster sibling to ODI in the current millennium.

No surprise that any high-speed operation cycle encourages entrepreneurship of the most dangerous kind. Investing for instant, hassle-free profit earning happens only in gambling which is also an age-old entertainment activity. Betting on anything with a ‘for quick money’ attracts bettors also called wagers. Bookies or ‘bookmakers’ are officially called ‘Turf Accountants’ who guide or bet on behalf of the stupid clients (also called punters) because they are master analyzers, determiners who are able to predict correct outcomes.

They collect betting money from the losers to pay the winners. The whole process is executed on a ‘mafia mode’ based on absolute trust and honesty. No one cheats or tells a lie. Hence the craze to place bets. Bookies came into existence to simply post betting odds on ‘horse racing.’ Now in all fast and decisive games one witnesses betting.

Cricket is the only game the Indian masses seem to have understood completely. People forget food, studies and paid-work to feast on cricket matches which do stall movie releases, postpone wedding events, and even push baby deliveries to a later date. An ordinary school-going kid can name the players of almost all the global teams, but will keep fumbling for a fortnight if asked to name just five players of the current Indian hockey team.

Unfortunately, Cricket today is the second most popular game in the world after ‘Soccer’, with a viewership of at least 1.3 billion. So bookies, fixers and punters are on the rise phenomenally. The first bookie on record had started business in 1780 at one Richard Tattersall’s horse auction. Two of the most respectable bookies in history are Fred Swindell and Leviathan Davies who were active in the 1850s.

Those days, betting was on outcome only, which is something like ‘match fixing’. But high-speed cricket bookies make more money from ‘spot fixing’ which is forecasting outcome after every set of ‘six overs’; sometimes every ball can be fixed too. The minimum bet amount is 1000 rupees in the rural areas, and between twenty thousand and a limitless amount in the urban centres. There is evidence of ‘rupees in crores’ being put as bet by single individuals for the temptation of easy money is so amazingly big.

The bookie identifies spot-fixers in the arena. Fail-safe players are secretly contacted to throw games- meaning underperform to lower the chances of victory (no one though can ever over-perform to win). So, Sreesanth who shoots the ball at 145 km per hour, was enticed to make easy money by under- playing and believably persuading team mates to do so for quick benefits. In result, bookies make billions only by increasing odds of the outcome.

Bowlers fling a couple of wides or no- balls, master-blasters swing the bats in the air as if contact was impossible and so on, as per the bookie’s instructions. Sreesanth, Ajit Chandila and Ankeet Chavan have confessed to fixing before the probe agency officials. Match fixing secrets first surfaced in 2000 when the South African hero Hansie Cronje was caught and banned from cricket. He died in a plane crash in 2002, a very repentant, depressed and dejected person.

Mohammad Azharuddin, Manoj Prabhakar and Ajay Jadeja and many more have been defamed and banished for unethical practices to make quick money. Similarly, Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir of Pakistan were caught and jailed in the UK for spot fixing. The faster the game, the bigger is the menace of fixing.

Twenty-20 is the worst format. It is no true cricket. It churns out rogues who relegate the ‘cricket sanctity’ to the garbage yard, under gratifying pressure from the bookies and fixers, all for quick money. The BCCI is rumoured to be the richest sporting outfit in the world with a net worth of 2 billion dollars, followed by the ‘Manchester United’ soccer concern with 1.87 billion and the ‘Dallas Cowboys’ Baseball organisation worth 1.65 billion.

‘Real Madrid’ and ‘Arsenal’ occupy the sixth and seventh positions respectively. The BCCI, established as a charitable organization in 1928 replacing the Calcutta Cricket Club, amended its bye-laws to become a profit making outfit in 2006. It is now flush with profit earning from scores of sources including TV rights, ground sponsorship, travel, hotels, advertisement revenue and so many more. In 2013-14, it has paid an income tax of nearly a Rs 1000-crore under protest and expects to get a refund of Rs 973 crore.

No wonder, greedy politicians, business tycoons and high- level lobbyists manipulate to be part of the BCCI’s management body. The IPL format rakes in the most and quickest dough for the BCCI. The former boss N Srinivasan, a cement baron, posing to be a saint, became a prime suspect for owning the Chennai Super Kings. His son-in-law Gurunath was an honorary management member of the CSK. He was arrested by the law enforcement. Srinivasan was unwilling to disappear from the scene saying he is demi-god ro the BCCIans.

The public outcry got so loud that the Supreme Court had him dismissed shamefully. Justice Anang Patnaik told him his presence was nauseating, and if he didn’t step down, the Court would pass a damning order. Frightened to the core, Srinivasan jumped out of the chair and stood aside.

It is an undeniable fact that the IPL has conclusively marred the reputation of cricket. In the last IPL extravaganza,several franchisees played against each other in 3-hour matches across two months with blanket television coverage, cheer girls and celebrity owners including Mukesh Ambani and Shahrukh Khan pulling enormous crowds to the game events filled with endless “match and spot fixing” opportunities. A conservative media estimate puts the betting money at a staggering 44.3 billion dollars which can easily coax saints to commit sins. Wise cricket experts now say, “Ban IPL or legalize betting to save cricket.”

All said and done, the Odisha crowd has brought shame to the state. People at the October 5 match behaved like hostile hosts. The permanent,lifelong President of OCA, one Ashirbad Behera, does not make room for any other person to replace him, which is autocracy-nay dictatorship. But the dictator is not one by displaying power of personality, but resorting to guile only.

No one can for sure say the Barabati fiasco was not fixed. Hopefully, it was not. Ashirbad meaning “blessing” in Sanskrit should better step down before the Apex Court finds his presence nauseating and passes a very demolishing order. On March 25 in 2014, the Supreme Court had demolished the wickedly crafty Srinivasan who later hypnotised voters to become the ICC president.

The BCCI never suffered any ignominy or shame for most self-serving members stood behind him on quid pro quo. But at long last, ‘Cement Srini’ has been ostracised by the BCCI. He is not even allowed to take part in any official deliberation at the BCCI. Sashank Manohar is new boss from Nagpur. But there is one big fear: he is crony to Sharad Pawar who can do anything to become the de facto boss at the filthily affluent and star-studded BCCI.