Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  The onset of new leagues – in T20, and the incipient T10 format – were ‘clearly a key integrity risk for the game,’ said Tony Irish, the head of FICA, the global players’ union. He suggested that fixing was ‘perhaps becoming an even greater risk with the exponential increase of new events and new stakeholders which aren’t subject to consistent minimum standards, including in the area of anti-corruption.’

  Such concerns were shared by a prominent betting trader, who was a regular source of intelligence for the ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit. ‘I don’t trade the Afghan Premier League or Canada League. Those tournaments are only set up by owners to fix.’

  Another prominent trader said that ‘in franchise cricket, my belief is that fixing mostly occurs as a vehicle for manipulating closer finishes – for the image of the league, keeping viewers interested, television etc – particularly in the PSL and IPL.’ He asserted that: ‘In general though, there is a habit in the IPL of making games closer than necessary,’ which raised suspicions.

  Instead of the biggest international markets, corruptors increasingly came to target domestic T20 leagues. Here, the cocktail of relatively low-paid players with insecure futures – often enviously playing alongside millionaires – and uneven quality of anti-corruption education and monitoring between different leagues created ample opportunities for fixers.

  ‘In some leagues the anti-corruption measures are good and in others they aren’t,’ said Irish. ‘There are no enforced minimum standards and there are no minimum player education requirements. There are many T20 league players moving around the world from league to league without any proper centralised monitoring of the standard of anti-corruption education they are receiving, or even whether they are receiving any appropriate education.’

  Between leagues, the quality of anti-corruption officials, and how well resourced these bodies were, varied dramatically. Generally boards do their own anti-corruption monitoring for their own domestic T20 leagues, enlisting their own national anti-corruption units, rather than the ICC’s. The ICC ACU attended tournaments when they were invited by the home boards, but many home boards decided not to invite the ICC. This created the possibility that, if corruption went all the way to the top of the administration of cricket in a particular country, there would be no one who was genuinely focused on catching the corruptors; those nominally employed by the board to police matches would have different motives.

  For Associate teams – those outside the 12 Full Members – the only mandatory anti-corruption training they received was a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation run by the ICC ACU before the start of ICC qualifying events, ESPNcricinfo journalist Peter Della Penna reported in 2018. Home boards, who invariably lacked cash, are responsible for providing supplementary education.

  This meant that, by the time that players got their brief education from the ICC, it could already be too late. In 2018, two Hong Kong players were charged for breaching the anti-corruption code during the 2016 Men’s T20 World Cup.

  T20 leagues from the IPL to South Africa’s Ram Slam League, the Pakistan Super League and Bangladesh Premier League have all suffered proven cases of players match-fixing. Pretty much every other league has been the subject of dark rumours. In 2018, Betfair withdrew their markets from the Karnataka Premier League, another regional T20 league in India, after what appeared to be suspicious betting behaviour.

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  Corruptors have shown themselves to be endlessly adaptable. Hassan Cheema, the manager of Islamabad United, a Pakistan Super League team who had two players banned for corruption in 2017, explained: ‘The Pakistan Cricket Board had this thing that players had an early curfew so that they wouldn’t get into the world which becomes like quicksand . . . But even if you have a curfew what’s stopping you from meeting during the day, or even in the hotel lobby?’

  And while fixers tended to lure their targets in through elaborate means, they could resort to violence too. ‘When you don’t agree to them it’s not you – it’s the threats against your family,’ said the anti-corruption insider, referring to what he has observed in south Asia especially. Across sport, fixers are so sophisticated that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has noted the involvement of organised crime syndicates to rig games.

  For the ACU, following the money was too often impossible. Worldwide, only about 15% of sports betting is legal and fully visible to regulators, according to the International Centre for Sport Security. About 35% is under-regulated and partially visible; and fully half is illegal and invisible to regulators, largely in Asia. Here – including, most significantly in India – gambling is mostly illegal, rendering it nearly impossible to follow betting patterns, and thus trace suspicious bets in the underground betting economy. This was a boon for fixers. Given where cricket’s strongholds are, it is likely that even less than 15% of all betting on the sport is legal. Gambling being illegal in so much of the world was perhaps the single biggest obstacle to keeping cricket clean.

  Even while gambling is illegal in most countries, match-fixing itself is not – perhaps because to legislate on match-fixing would amount to tacit acknowledgement that betting goes on. But this serves to limit the ACU’s powers. The ACU has the right to demand mobile phones, phone bills and bank account details – only, it cannot be sure that a suspect handing in their phone uses another strictly for fixing purposes, or that one showing their bank details has another Swiss bank account to receive their payments from fixing. If the suspect is hiding a bank account or mobile phone, the ACU must be able to prove that the suspect is failing to comply before being able to charge them for non-compliance.

  So while the ACU has become more activist, and successful in its cases, in recent years, the body remains hampered. To be truly empowered, and as effective as possible, the ACU would need the same powers of law enforcement.

  All of this highlighted a simple truth, as the anti-corruption insider noted. For corruptors, the age of T20 meant ‘there’s more opportunities than ever before . . . Logic tells you a lot of games are fixed because of the amount of games being played.’

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  Over the 1990s, the physique of baseball players in the US was transformed. Players, including those who had been professional for years, became fitter, stronger, and able to hit the ball further and harder. Burly arms moved from being the exception to the rule. All of this was heralded as a triumph for uber-professionalism, sports science and players’ sheer determination to gain every possible advantage on the field.

  Undoubtedly, it owed to all these things. But it also owed to something else: performance-enhancing drugs.

  Even as rumours swirled over certain players taking drugs, baseball fans, and the authorities, consoled themselves with a simple thought: baseball was a skill-based game, so cheats couldn’t prosper. Unlike other games, the sport was too skill-based and too subtle for drug cheats to benefit. The illusion was maintained even as records for home runs were broken.

  This comfort blanket ignored that, if two hitters are equally skilful, one who is able to hit the ball further will be far more effective. The need for huge skill in hitters, then, did not prevent them being able to accrue an advantage by taking performance-enhancing drugs to bulk up. Besides pure strength, steroid use brought wider benefits – notably to a player’s recovery time, so they would miss fewer games, which would increase their output and make them more valuable to teams.

  Baseball was ‘head in the sand’ about the drug threat, George Vecsey wrote in Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game. It had never had a problem before, so why should one emerge?

  In 2005, this unthinking faith was shattered. Soon, baseball was grappling with a steroids epidemic. Barry Bonds, one of the greatest sluggers in history, was forever discredited by allegations that he had taken performance-enhancing drugs. Congressional hearings uncovered rampant doping; insiders commonly estimated that at least a quarter of players – many more, some claimed – doped.

  The parallels between cricket and
baseball are often noted. They extend to the benefits for players of using performance-enhancing drugs, too. ‘We know the ICC and World Anti-Doping Agency [WADA] view that the power-based skill set required in T20 makes it a sport that fits within a similar profile to baseball,’ said Irish. ‘It would be naive to think that it’s not an integrity threat to any elite sport.’

  The surge in six hitting in recent years mirrors the rise in home runs hit during the steroids era. While there are a myriad of reasons for the splurge in sixes, notably batsmen being trained specifically for T20 and being trained to value their wickets less, the six-hitting boom has distilled what could be gained from using performance-enhancing drugs to hit the ball further and more reliably.

  Balls per Six in T20 Cricket by Year

  Year

  Balls per Six

  2008

  27

  2009

  28

  2010

  27

  2011

  27

  2012

  27

  2013

  25

  2014

  24

  2015

  23

  2016

  23

  2017

  21

  2018

  20

  ‘In the risk profile of sport, cricket is generally designated as a low-risk sport. But I believe that T20 cricket has changed the nature of the game – in that format at least. It is now probably, and this is an exaggeration, approaching a form of baseball,’ said Dr Shuaib Ismail Manjra, chairman of the Cricket South Africa medical committee and a board member of the South African Institute for Drug-Free Sport. ‘The risk of doping should be higher in T20 cricket and the risk profile should be amended accordingly.’

  Being physically bigger and stronger brought a far greater advantage in T20 than the sport’s longer formats. The early years of T20 have seen players bulk up as the sport professionalises – a revolution that remains unfinished. ‘The physique of players is changing massively,’ said England’s T20 captain Eoin Morgan. ‘Eventually everyone is going to be big and strong. Bowlers might not change that much in terms of physique but batters certainly are.’ Only in recent years, with the professionalism of players elevated to a new level, has cricket reached the stage where training regimes are sufficiently rigorous for players to even benefit from doping.

  ‘T20 cricket is about power, force and strength, in addition to the other skills required,’ Dr Manjra explained. ‘There’s tremendous intensity in 20 overs of batting. Furthermore, many of these tournaments consist of back-to-back games which require quick recovery. So there is a greater potential for doping.’

  The salience of physique has created a greater incentive to dope. ‘T20, being a more athletic and dynamic version of cricket, places increased demands on players’ bodies and power outputs,’ explained Andrea Petroczi, a specialist in sports drugs from Kingston University in London. ‘This makes the sport more prone to drugs, relative to the more traditional, ‘leisurely’ first-class form, as T20 demands better fitness levels, higher levels of strength, speed, agility and reaction time.’ Petroczi cited anabolic steroids, such as testosterone, and other anabolic agents – like clenbuterol and selective androgen receptor modulators – as being particularly attractive to those looking to hit the ball further, because they can promote the development of muscle and, therefore, power. Doping to aid power hitting feels very much like a sin of its time.

  For bowlers the advantages of doping are less immediately obvious. Yet, as Petroczi explained, just as with pitchers in baseball, drugs like anabolic steroid hormone, which increases the level of testosterone in the body, could help bowlers recover from injury at a dramatically faster rate, or become less susceptible to injuries. With players’ earning power tied to their availability, returning to play earlier could have appreciable financial benefits for T20 players – who could therefore earn more cash by playing a fuller part in T20 leagues. Doping could even help fast bowlers bowl quicker. Indeed, there are periodic murmurings on the T20 circuit about fast bowlers who have acquired new pace at a suspicious rate.

  Instead of multi-year contracts, that were the norm in domestic cricket competitions in first-class and one-day cricket, T20 contracts are often only a single year, and salaries are tied to a player’s fitness and form. So even missing a few matches brings a notable financial cost. In the IPL, for instance, overseas players’ fees are on a per-match basis, with players earning only 50% of their allocated match fee if they are unavailable for a game, and 80% if they are available but not selected. A player signed for $1.4 million would get $100,000 for playing in each of the 14 group matches, and lose $50,000 if they were injured for a game.

  The economist Gary Becker was once late for an appointment. He chose to park on the street illegally, calculating that the low chance of being caught was worth the risk. He didn’t get a ticket, and declared that ‘criminal behaviour is rational’ – those who break laws often weigh up the risks of an action against the rewards. Seeing taking performance-enhancing drugs through this prism, the incentives for taking performance-enhancing drugs are compelling for some players.

  For older cricketers, who may already be planning for their life after cricket, the risk-reward calculation of doping – a big hitter using steroids to bulk up, say – is particularly attractive. Getting caught would merely end a career nearing the end of its natural course; using drugs to perform well enough to survive for a couple of extra years on the T20 circuit could easily be worth a seven-figure amount.

  So if the explosion of money in cricket reduced incentives for players to deliberately underperform, at least at the top level, it may have had the opposite impact on would-be dopers. If the sport’s financial boom has made the cost-benefit analysis of cheating to lose less advantageous, it has made the cost-benefit analysis of cheating to win – doping to gain an unfair advantage – more favourable.

  This attraction is compounded by the insecurity of the T20 circuit. Freelance T20 players have both the most job insecurity and, because all they play is T20, the most to gain from bulking up, or making sure they are fit to play in more tournaments.

  Many of the same underlying problems with how cricket is structured encourages both match-fixing and doping alike. In both cases, the risks are exacerbated by ‘transient workplaces and high-performance environments, combined with a lack of globally coordinated, enforceable or accessible minimum gold standard education across the entire approved cricket framework,’ said Irish from the global players’ union.

  The insecurity inherent in T20 life may make the rewards of cheating to win, or to lose, more appealing. In 2018, FICA found that 55% of players felt insecure or very insecure about their employment situation, and 66% of cricketers worldwide lacked any contract of longer than a year. Most revealingly, 88% said they favoured a long-term secure contract rather than the benefits of being able to move freely and flexibly.

  In the case of doping, the ICC was not oblivious to this threat. The ICC began drug-testing at its events in 2002, became a signatory of the WADA code in 2006 and approved WADA’s whereabouts rule in 2010. Most significantly, in 2017 the ICC introduced blood testing, and athletic biological passports, at its events. This was driven by a belief that EPO [Erythropoietin Stimulation Agents] and HGH [Human Growth Hormone], which are not covered under the standard urine analysis and can only be detected through blood analysis, were at risk of being used by cricketers. The ICC’s integrity app, launched in 2017, means players should be completely aware of which substances are banned. From 2019, samples collected at ICC will be subject to long-term storage for ten years, belatedly catching up with what has been standard policy in many other sports for years. Samples will now be able to be retested for prohibited substances for which there is currently no reliable test for detection.

  But, even within ICC events themselves, considered to have the most robust anti-doping procedures in cricket, testing figures remain notably lower than i
n other sports. One player who appeared in five ICC global events, including multiple recent editions of the T20 World Cup, said he had only been tested once during these events.

  The real concern is that the ICC’s remit on doping remains very limited, creating a fragmented anti-doping structure. While the ICC conducts out-of-competition testing on cricketers who have played, or been a substitute, in international matches in the previous two years, players who have not played international cricket in this period, or have retired from the international game, are not subject to ICC testing.

  Strikingly, the ICC’s whereabouts rules for cricketers only affects players ranked in the top eight one-day international countries, criteria which excluded the West Indies, the T20 World Cup champions, for several years. Indeed, there are just 88 players eligible for whereabouts out-of-competition drugs testing by the ICC at any one time. Under ICC rules, only the top five ranked batsmen and bowlers, and leading wicketkeeper, for the top eight ODI countries are liable to be tested by the ICC’s whereabouts out-of-competition programme, though the ICC still does out-of-competition testing for countries from outside the top eight.

  ‘The thought that the rules on anti-doping aren’t the same for every country in world cricket is bizarre – frankly it amazes me,’ said the senior medical official from a leading nation. ‘The fact that only the top eight are subject to that is a huge surprise.’ This means that when countries from outside this eight compete with ones ranked higher up in the World Cup, ‘they’re not playing by the same rules’. With many T20 leagues and national governing bodies doing few tests, that leaves many players dependent upon their national anti-doping organisations. Yet national anti-doping organisations focus upon Olympic sports; most seldom, if ever, Test cricketers.