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December 5, 2008
Don't bet against it
Posted on 12/05/2008 in Corruption
The match-fixing scandal at the turn of the decade led to the downfall of Hansie Cronje and Mohammad Azharuddin, among others, and brought home to officials and the public just how big the issue was. Over the past few years it has almost disappeared from the agenda - but hasn't gone away, Peter Roebuck writes in the Sydney Morning Herald. The game, especially the Twenty20 format, is once again in danger of being overrun by bookies and match-fixing, he says.
But 20-over cricket has lured them from their hideaways. Conversations with Indian Cricket League players confirm that the bookmakers are running amok in the rebel league, and it'd be the height of folly to assume that the Indian Premier League has remained intact. These players talk about strange events in matches, and one thinks he played in a match both sides were trying to lose. Others speak about batsmen suddenly playing out a maiden or padding up to a spinner, an odd technique to use in a 20-over contest.
March 25, 2007
A World Cup forever overshadowed
Posted on 03/25/2007 in Bob Woolmer
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There has only been one story in the cricket this week
© AFP
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The Sunday broadsheets continue to try and make sense of Bob Woolmer's murder. In The Independent on Sunday, Nick Townsend says that the game Woolmer loved so much has been pushed firmly into the background. He also extends the theory that perhaps Woolmer knew too much about the darker side of the game.
From a World Cup of tantalising possibilities, it has become a Cup of Woe. Rather like the feeling of emptiness and despair which overcame us when the 1985 European Cup final proceeded while the bodies were still being removed at the Heysel Stadium, does anyone really care about the cricket?
Also in the Independent on Sunday, Stephen Brenkley gives a very personal tribute to Woolmer.
But his greatest virtue had nothing to do with his cricketing prowess. It was that he had time for everybody. There was no side to Bobby. In the high-pressure world of big-time cricket, he did not seal himself in a bubble. He wanted to embrace the whole world.
A common theme is also that Woolmer should have been England coach, probably back in 1999 when David Lloyd took over, and, even at the age of 58, would have commanded an interview to take over from Duncan Fletcher. Simon Wilde, in The Sunday Times, looks at Woolmer the coach
Meanwhile, in the Sunday Telegraph Mike Atherton insists the ICC can no longer decide the game’s future with the focus solely on money.
There is no suggestion that Woolmer's murder has anything to do with corruption. Even so, it is time for the administrators of the game to take note; time to put the game's long-term interests first, rather than the need to make decisions with purely money in mind, no matter what the consequences.
Just ask yourself why we have seen so many mis-matches in the opening week of the tournament and why there are more teams, 16, than ever before, even though some of them would struggle to beat a good London club side. With Ireland and Bangladesh going through to the second stage of the tournament, the ICC should be careful what they wish for.
The the same paper, Lord MacLaurin, the former chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, has called for a major review of the ICC.
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