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Anvar Alikhan

A whole different ball-game

Hey, I don't see what all this whole match-fixing fuss is about. Really, I don't.

Let us, just for a moment, assume that some of the cricketers are guilty. Let us assume they have taken large amounts of money in exchange for playing badly. My question is, "So what?"

Face it: People in every walk of life in India are crooked. Some of our politicians are crooks. Some businessmen are crooks. Some bureaucrats are crooks. Some cops are crooks. Some lawyers are crooks.

We don't seem to have any problem accepting all of this. So why then, should we expect anything different of our cricketers?

Why a separate moral code for them? Why should we single them out to be great, shining paragons of moral cleanliness? Why this discrimination? After all, ours is a democratic country and cricketers have the same rights as anyone else. The right to be corrupt happens to be just one of them.

Nobody has been able to answer my question satisfactorily -- although various people have tried.

One friend indignantly pointed out that cricketers are icons of the youth and therefore in accepting bribes they are creating a rotten example for our kids. Okay, but then film stars and pop stars are also icons of the youth, yet we have no fantastic moral expectations of them. (And, speaking of which, isn't it sad that nobody expects our politicians to set any kind of example for the youth -- or for anybody else, for that matter?)

Another very upset friend said the point was that the bribes were accepted as quid pro quo for throwing matches. To re-phrase this, our cricketers took money for playing badly. Big deal. Our politicians and bureaucrats, for instance, play badly for free (which, arguably, is even worse) and nobody seems to mind that very much.

Yet another friend said the real shame of it all was that our cricketers are already so damned wealthy that they don't need to take any bribes. But then who is to tell me how much money is "enough" for me? And in any case, why don't people tell politicians exactly how wealthy they are allowed to get? (What was the figure in Laloo's celebrated fodder scandal? Rs 1,000 crore?)

No folks, that is not the way to view the entire issue.

The way to look at it is that cricket today is just showbiz. (There was a time when it was some kind of pristine, boring sport, but that era went out some time between Tiger Pataudi and Sunil Gavaskar.) And if we could single out one culprit, it would probably be Kerry Packer, who came along and suddenly put everybody in pastel-coloured uniforms, under the floodlights, wearing designer sunglasses and flashing seven-figure cheques. Suddenly, cricket was no longer cricket; it was just entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. What we're seeing now is just a logical progression of this fact....

The result is that today cricket is no different from WWF wrestling. (Nobody over the age of six imagines that it is a sport; we all know that it's rigged ...but it's still great fun to watch.)

Once we have accepted this new WWF metaphor, everything falls into perspective and we can all get on with life. And with cricket.

As the game evolves along these lines, it'll become even more fun. Like the wrestlers, cricketers will begin to wear really outrageous outfits. Instead of just sun-blocker, they'll use real war-paint. They'll have fun names ('Terminator Tendulkar', 'Killing machine Kumble', 'Gangbuster Ganguly', etc). They'll snarl and swagger and threaten each other on the field. They'll scream and throw tantrums and chase umpires off the field for bad lbw decisions. They will even have occasional, well-choreographed fights, body-slamming each other and clobbering each other with bats (although, of course, nobody will ever get hurt). Who knows, we may even eventually have rules for not more than so many mandatory fights per innings?

I, for one, am really looking forward to it all. It may not exactly be cricket. But like they say, "Hey, it's a whole different ball-game!"

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