Image courtesy of: India Times
Boycott believes match-fixing will plummet if the Indian government were to legalise betting
The Indian Premier League (IPL) match-fixing scandal has taken the entire cricketing world by surprise, but former England captain Geoffrey Boycott believes the only way to ensure another serious event like this never occurs again is to legalise betting in India.
Boycott noted the black market betting industry is thriving since betting in the country is illegal, but, if the government were to reverse their stance on the issue, then the black market bookies will be out of business fairly soon.
“The way to stop it altogether, except for the odd one –but we’re getting too many at the minute — is this business of making betting legal in India. It’s illegal, so people do it,” Boycott told ESPNcricinfo. “When beer was illegal in America during prohibition, you had all this illegal drinking and all these mafia-type people and so forth involved. And so you’ll get the worst type of society involved in betting, from the bookies and that sort of people, when you have something that people want to do but it’s illegal.”
However, while Boycott understands the Indian government does not like to change laws, he urged them to consider making betting legal as it will not only benefit the sport, but the country as well.
“Many people have suggested to the Indian government that making betting legal at cricket, like it’s legal in horse-racing and so on, would stamp most of it [corruption] out,” he said. “But you know what it’s like. Trying to explain to the Indian government, they think you are telling them something, they don’t like it and they don’t like to change.”
The former England captain also pointed out that a majority of illegal betting syndicates tend to be located in and around the sub-continent and Middle East areas, with India and Dubai being two of the most popular countries.
“We don’t seem to get it in other countries,” he said. “It seems to be around in Asia. And that’s not me being against Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis. You know me, I love that part of the world. They are very kind and good to me, particularly the Indian and Pakistani people, where I’ve been a lot.
“But I’m telling you the truth, it seems to surface in Asia. And once you’ve got all this money floating around in a huge game with millions and millions involved, you’re going to get problems. It’s going to resurface again.”
However, Boycott admitted that it would be impossible for cricket to be completely clean again.
“Irrespective of how many safeguards or preventive measures you introduce, human nature being what it is, there’ll always be the off person that tries to beat the system, tries to do something illegal, that’s always going to happen,” he said. “It’s not just about cricket. In anything, it’s always going to happen.
“But it is coming up too often and it’s still there. And whether we like it or not, it comes up with Asian players. It came up with the Pakistani lad playing for Essex (Danish Kaneria), didn’t it, the legspinner? So it always concerns me and should concern everybody.”
While the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and Indian police sift through all the information surrounding the match-fixing scandal, the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) Anti-corruption and Security Unit’s (ACSU) absence has been noted by Boycott.
“It wasn’t the ICC or the BCCI’s anti-corruption wing that found out what was happening,” he said. “All this money is being spent by cricket and they never come up with anything. It’s the Indian police that find it.”
The reason match-fixing remains rife in cricket, according to Boycott, is due to the vast difference in salaries between senior players and youngsters that have just come into the side.
“I think when you have a situation like the IPL, where four players in a team – I know sometimes they have six or seven (such) in a squad – have huge, huge money and then you’re talking about four, five or six of the local Indian players who are not getting paid very much, you have a situation that’s waiting to explode,” he said. “When they don’t get paid much money, it’s very tempting. You see people getting a million dollars, people like Kevin Pietersen get paid USD 2 million if they play the entire series, and (if these others) are getting peanuts, then they are open to the bookies.”
However, despite this latest scandal, Boycott believes the IPL will continue to go on if such incidents do not occur in future.
“When anything like that happens, it does hurt it a bit,” he said. “But I don’t think people are stupid enough to say, ‘Hey, this is all the IPL.’ If somebody robs a bank in Yorkshire, it doesn’t mean Yorkshiremen are corrupt, does it? It’s the same here.
“It doesn’t mean because you’ve caught three or four people doing this stuff…there might be two or three more who might come out of the woodwork when we get into it, but it doesn’t mean everybody in the IPL are (corrupt). You can’t taint everybody because of the few. You can’t do that.
“If it keeps on happening – that’s the point – that people are caught for corruption in the IPL, then it will hurt it.”