Cricketing convictions

Published on Halsbury's Law Exchange here

Recently three Pakistani test cricketers, Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir, were convicted of conspiracy to cheat at gambling and conspiracy to accept corrupt payments, arising out of Pakistan’s tour of England in 2010.  They were sentenced to 30 months, 12 months and 6 months’ imprisonment respectively (Amir having pleaded guilty).  Butt has recently lodged an appeal against sentence. Regrettably, although it is the first such prosecution in the UK, only a delusional optimist would assume it will be the last. It therefore falls to be considered whether the sentences were justified.

The convictions arose out of a sting by the News of the World newspaper in August 2010.  Cricket, being amenable to extensive statistical analysis, perhaps more than any other sport, lends itself to “spot betting”.  Aside from betting solely on the outcome, any number of bets on the procedure of the game are possible – how many boundaries will be hit during the course of the day; who will be the highest or lowest scorer in each innings; how many extras will be bowled and by whom; and so on – in other words, all the minutiae which fills many pages in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack each year and considerable amounts of data on websites such as Cricinfo as well.

In turn the endless possibilities make it much easier for the unscrupulous bookmakers to try and rig bets.  It would be one thing – and hopefully a difficult one – to persuade an individual player to throw his wicket, still less an entire team to throw a match. Even if a team could be so persuaded, it would take some considerable effort to throw a match without arousing suspicion.  It would be much easier on the other hand to persuade someone not to score a boundary off a particular over in a test, which potentially can run to 450 overs, or to bowl a wide or no-ball off a particular delivery.  Such would usually – but not always, as we shall see – be inconsequential.

These possibilities gave rise to the three prosecutions.  The News of the World filmed a sports agent, Mazhar Majeed, counting bribe money and stating that Asif and Amir (both fast bowlers) would bowl no-balls at specified stages of the Lord’s test. In the event both did exactly as Majeed predicted.  They were not marginal no balls either: the television commentators expressed bewilderment at the extent to which Amir in particular had overstepped.

No balls are, of course, commonplace in cricket, particularly amongst fast bowlers, but the odds against predicting exactly when they will occur would be almost impossibly high.  Five hundred and forty balls will be delivered in the course of a normal day’s test cricket, and the only credible explanation of both players doing exactly as Majeed said they would is that they were indeed in his pocket.

It followed necessarily that Butt had colluded in the affair, because, as captain, he alone had the power to decide who would bowl and when. 

Initially cricket’s governing board, the ICC, conducted its own investigation, and went on to impose bans of ten years for Butt (of which five were suspended), seven years for Asif (of which two were suspended) and five years for Amir.  The criminal prosecution then followed.  (Majeed was also convicted after pleading guilty and received the longest sentence of all, but this article is confined to the cricketers themselves.)

The result of the ICC’s ban coupled with the sentences of imprisonment is likely to be the end of Butt’s career.  At the very least Asif’s will be seriously curtailed.  Only Amir, aged 19, seems likely to play again.
The question thus arises as to whether the offences justified penalties that are personally and professionally ruinous, along with the other consequences of imprisonment. 

The answer has to be a resounding yes, for two reasons.  The first is the recent history of corruption in cricket. The second is that despite some differing views, it seems to me unarguable that even the slightest spot fix seriously undermines the game. 

As to the first of those reasons, many cricketing correspondents have enjoyed displaying their historical knowledge by pointing out that cricket’s origins as an organised sport in something like its modern form lie in an excuse for gambling (see, for example, Reverend Pycroft’s The Cricketer’s Field, written in 1851). 
Corruption of the sort with which Pycroft was concerned had long died out by 1981 when inveterate horse racing fans Lillee and Marsh famously induced a frosty atmosphere into an already gloomy Australian dressing room by revealing a successful bet on England at 500-1 odds at Headingly.  That was properly seen as an innocent if very poorly judged act on the part of the two players.

Modern match fixing and spot-fixing began a few years after the surge in interest in cricket on the subcontinent which accompanied India’s victory in the limited overs World Cup in 1983. It reached world attention in the early 2000s when the-then South African captain, Hanse Cronje, was found to have accepted a string of payments for distorting matches.  Two senior Australian cricketers, Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, were also found to have had some contact with a bookmaker in the 1990s – most ill advisedly suppressed at the time by the Australian cricket authorities – although it was not suggested they had agreed to alter matches, only that they provided useful information about conditions and players. But it was clear that the involvement of bookmakers with cricketers could not be dismissed as occasional skullduggery on the subcontinent which the rest of the cricketing world could pretend to ignore. 

The ICC’s response included an inquiry by a former senior British police officer, Sir Paul Congdon, but although the issue drifted from headlines only the most hopeless optimist would ever have assumed that the problem had gone away. The true extent can of course never be known. But we now have judicial confirmation that it still very much exists, and constitutes the first reason why the courts have to respond with stiff sentences as a deterrent. 

The second reason is that even apparently insignificant actions such as a no-ball here and there can have a strong influence on the outcome of a match.  Not all have seen it that way: in the immediate aftermath of the match at Lord’s, a former President of MCC, Field Marshall Lord Brammall, struggled to see what the fuss was about.  On 31 August he wrote to the Telegraph in these terms:

“It was most regrettable that this incident was alleged to have happened in the fourth Test … Let no one, however, try, as I am afraid some have tried to do, to consider this a significant part of the game itself, impinging on the historical reputation of this test match.

The delivery of the odd obvious no-ball would not and did not change the course of the match or the outcome.”

Lord Brammall seems to have forgotten many a famous no-ball of test matches past. To take just one example (a genuine no ball in a series which has never had any suggestion of wrongdoing): in the fourth test of the 2005 Ashes series, Michael Vaughan was bowled early on by a no-ball; he went on to score 166, the highest score of the match, and thus the fact of Glenn McGrath overstepping had a considerable significance. 

But the point is wider than that.  As the judge inferred, if the fact of the Pakistani fixing has not cast a pall over every future international fixture, it will at least cause a question, or suspicion, to be raised every time something extraordinary appears to take place; and of course a central part of the enjoyment when watching sports is witnessing extraordinary events – the tragic dropped catch, the farcical run-out, the ill-judged moment after a day’s solid concentration, and so forth.  In those circumstances substantial terms of imprisonment were, rightly, inevitable.