Like many before him, S Sreesanth, this week, was hit hard by the painful realisation that the taint of match-fixing can never be completely wiped out. The harder you try, the brighter the stain glows. It had all started at a nondescript league game for retired cricketers in Surat where, according to Sreesanth, Gambhir called him a “fixer”.
The synopsis of the decade-old backstory reads as follows: Sreesanth gets named in the 2013 IPL spot-fixing case, he is charged for entertaining bookies, BCCI bans him for life, the matter goes to court, Sreesanth gets relief.
It’s in this context that Sreesanth thought the worst was over. He was wrong. Sreesanth would do what those gripped by anger do these days. He took to social media. “Are you above the Supreme Court?” – he asked Gambhir. He would also call his former teammate an arrogant and classless individual.
Gambhir’s post, around the same time, had a smile and a philosophical short message for attention-seekers. It was another day at one of the many town squares of the digital world. Two men squabbling with a crowd of gawkers cheering their favourite.
However, this isn’t about taking sides in a spat between two habitual on-field rabble rousers. This also isn’t a sermon on where the line should be drawn when it comes to sledging. This is about the black mark that gets etched with a branding iron on those caught with their hand in the cookie jar or even the suspects with sticky hands and crumbs on their face.
History of taint
In the subcontinent’s long murky history of match-fixing; favourable court verdicts, cricket board pardons, clean chit by inquiry commissions and factually inaccurate biopics does provide an airbrushed reentry into the fold but it can’t ensure a squeaky clean image or stop stray taunts.
Far more talented cricketers, with much older cases, have found themselves in Sreesanth-like situations. Close to two decades after his retirement and about 30 years after the watershed Justice Qayyum inquiry in the corruption cases in Pakistan cricket, Wasim Akram gets to hear what Gambhir had apparently told Sreesanth.
Just last year at the launch of his memoir, Akram had sounded a bit like Sreesanth. “Around the world, when they talk about the best bowler in the world, my name pops up but in Pakistan, this generation, this social media generation … they say, ‘oh, he is a match fixer’, not knowing what it was. I have passed that stage in my life where I have to worry about people,” he said. It was difficult to say if Akram had sounded disappointed or worried.
More recently, another former Pakistan captain Salman Butt faced much more snide remarks. Butt was jailed and banned for his leading role in the infamous 2010 spot-fixing saga. This week he was all set to be main-streamed. Pakistan cricket’s newly appointed chief selector Wahab Riaz, who too had played a bit part in that sordid News of the World expose, extended him a selection consultancy role. As expected, national and international outrage followed. The F word would figure in the headline for Mike Atherton’s column in Sunday Times. “Banish fixer Salman Butt for good – captains should know better”. PCB wilted, Butt was banished.
Back in India, another cricketer with a past, Mohammad Azharuddin was busy campaigning for the assembly elections. Since hanging his boots, he has made it to the parliament, been a state cricket administrator, is back on BCCI’s mailing list, endorsed a Bollywood movie that gave him a clean chit but most of his political profiles mention his match-fixing days.
Notorious 90s
The era in which Azhar played most of his cricket, the 90s, was when the game’s credibility was at its nadir. This wasn’t just the chatter on the circuit. The ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit chief during that time, Sir Paul Condon, had made a cynical assessment of the game back then. “In the late 1990s, Test and World Cup matches were being routinely fixed. From the late Eighties certainly through to 1999-2000 there were a number of teams involved in fixing, and certainly more than the Indian sub-continent teams were involved,” London’s former Commissioner of the Metropolitan had said.
The players of those dubious games in the 90s have aged, many have served bans for wrongdoings. They now sit in commentary boxes. Most have no resemblance to their younger self. They have sharp observations and deep understanding of the game. However, in case they express an unpopular opinion, their social media timelines are flooded with the F word.
In nations that are unreasonably invested in cricket, the breach of trust by cricketers, or even a smudge on their credibility, isn’t forgotten or forgiven easily. When police chargesheets unmask the larger than life much-worshipped super heroes and present them to the world as weak-willed compromised puppets controlled by some seedy betting syndicate, even the unbelievable seems believable.
When someone as important as the Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar points to a red towel hanging from Sreesanth’s pants and calls it the signal for the bookies, it’s human to be convinced. It was an unforgettable frame. Such was its power that no court verdicts could uproot the seed of doubt embedded deep in the mind.
So lawyers might have helped Sreesanth regain acceptability but they couldn’t guarantee the respectability of his earlier life. In the court of law, for an accused to be proved guilty, the prosecution needs to eliminate every reasonable doubt in the mind of the judge. Unfortunately, as Sreesanth learnt the hard way, out on the street or a cricket pitch the bar isn’t that high.
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Former India seamer S Sreesanth (left) and legendary Pakistan pacer Wasim Akram (File) 
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