I was back on All India Radio’s Sports Scan, the half-hour bulletin of sports news, on November 6, 2011, coinciding with the opening day of the first Test in the India-West Indies cricket series. It was natural that cricket took up much of the time that the host Shivendra Chaturvedi and I devoted on the show.
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Justice Jeremey Cook touched a raw nerve when he spoke of young fast bowler Mohammed Aamer’s social background. “You come from a village background where life has been hard.. Compared with others, you were unsophisticated, uneducated and impressionable…,” he said last week when he sentenced the three cricketers and a bookmaker to imprisonment for cheating and conspiracy.
And, at once, many started using this information when painting a prototype of the cricketer who could fall prey to temptations. The sketch that emerged was one of a rustic cricketer who was poorly educated and could be easily manipulated. We seemed to forget that greed does not look at the upbringing or sociological, educational or economic background of the cricketers.
The heart sank as Justice Jeremy Cooke handed out prison terms and financial penalties to three cricketers and a bookmaker in far away London on Thursday. For the first time, cricketers were being sentenced in a court of law for being greedy as well as abetting and committing on-field misdemeanours.
Freeze frames of the events that shook the very foundations of cricket in the year 2000 came rushing back to the mind. And, at the same time, it was tough to stop oneself from wondering what would have happened had the cricketers been trapped by a sting operation in the sub-continent.
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