Not Quite Cricket

The day the Delhi police went to press with allegations of match-fixing against the captain of the South African cricket team, Hansie Cronje, the cricketing world went into a tailspin from which it is unlikely to recover for a while. Cronje's subsequent admission that he had accepted money from a bookmaker came as a shock to all those who had looked up to him both as an outstanding player and as a man of unquestionable integrity who put the game and his country before all else. However, the recent outrage is only the latest in an ever-increasing number of incidents involving the world's top cricketers. five years earlier, Australian cricketers Mark Waugh and Shane Warne were fined by the Australian Cricket Board for accepting money in exchange for pitch- and weather-related information. Halfway across the world, Rashid Latif in Pakistan and Manoj Prabhakar in India lashed out at what they called an organised Mafia that controlled the game in the subcontinent with the help of leading players from both countries.