How cricket became the Maradona of sport

As must be the case for many cricket devotees, the spot-fixing trial has brought on a huge amount of squabbling emotions which have veered from disgust to glibness to astonishment and even perhaps callousness. It has been extremely difficult to follow the goings on and ultimate results of the proceedings at Southwark Crown Court and come to any sort of settled notion as to how to respond to the most seismic event I’ve seen in cricket since being lured into its clutches watching Mike Gatting’s England side claim the Ashes in Australia in 1986/87.As an eight-year-old back then the idea that cricket could be so riven with dishonesty and malevolence was anathema, not only because of the insulating naivety of being eight, but because alongside being transfixed by Maradona at the 1986 World Cup, I was being willingly ravaged by sport’s advances for the first time, and the fact it was largely Gladstone Small and a Australian sports network’s cartoon duck doing the ravaging mattered very little. Cricket in many respects now seems to have become the Maradona of sports: bloated, troubled and deeply flawed, but still rightly adored through it all for what it has provided and still provides to all those who endure its tangled maelstrom to savour the brilliance and joy it offers.

The real Mr Cricket in action

There’s a Sanjay the Bookie special odds on chance that might all be verbose balls, but it’s difficult to be pithy about seeing Mohammad Amir sent to reenact Scum at Feltham Young Offenders Institute after previously seeing him reenact Seabiscuit. Even though his tales of forced complicity and raped innocence have unravelled like a toilet roll, there remains the nagging and probably wholly unworthy thought that this is a boy trapped inside the rotten manifestations of adulthood. Ten seconds later and that nagging thought is replaced by revulsion towards both myself for such saccharine, schmaltzy tolerance and towards Amir for the rusty-knifed, cold-eyed castration he’s perpetrated against cricket. Similarly, in the same instance of loathing Salman Butt for his suave, debonair conning of all who bought into the deceit that his accession to Pakistan’s captaincy in 2010 meant a return of calm decency after the maverick excesses of Shahid Afridi, it is also intensely difficult not to have some form of empathy with the unimaginable distress his wife is going through having given birth to their son on the same day her husband was found guilty. Such empathy did not, however, prevent me from making what could justifiably be called a graceless comment about that appalling family situation at the end of a satirical cricket podcast.

That the News of the World is the only protagonist to come out of the affair with any sort of credit goes some way to indicating just how squalid and confusing the entire business has been. From the obfuscation and easy to regard as willful ignorance of the PCB’s former head, Ijaz Butt, to the impotence and continuing state of denial that the ICC maintains, the idea that this trial marks some sort of watershed for cricket is at this stage a pipe dream to rank alongside the most deluded.

Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the Head of the ICC’s Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (ACSU), was today interviewed by the ICC’s in-house radio station in an exchange that would have made even the editor of Pravda blush. Regardless of this soft soaping and whatever your views on Ulster politics, Flanagan himself or his time as head of police in Northern Ireland, he is undoubtedly a man more exposed than most of us of to the nature and complexities of criminality. It’s this fact that makes his claim in that interview that “(corruption) is certainly not rampant in the world of cricket” so much more galling to read. One man’s rampant is another man’s restricted, of course, but can anyone who’s followed the events and allegations in court over the last few weeks really have faith such an opinion isn’t absurdly optimistic?

Flanagan also labelled those criticising the ACSU as ‘ill informed’ and on that count I’m guilty as sin. I’m ill informed about what has been achieved since the Condon report in 2001, ill informed about what the ACSU actually does despite spending a great deal of time scouring the ICC website, and ill informed to the point of exasperation as to what realistically we can hope the ACSU or any other such organisation to achieve in the face of acrid old human nature and its ceaseless and irredeemable capacity for greed and corruption. What a merry time of it I’d be having if I could only swap this adult ignorance for that of my eight-year-old self, when bliss really was believing Gladstone Small was the world’s most fantastic bowler, player and man and that lovely, magnificent cricket was nothing more consequential than just the world’s greatest sport.

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