What's the bet this game goes on...

DOES THE game of cricket stand devalued to a point of no return to sanity? Let no player rejoice in the fact that a swinging superstar has been brought down, an off-peg or two, in international esteem.

For the very player exulting about this could be the next one on the list! Is there any end to this kind of media mudslinging? Sadly, we seem to have lived into times where you cannot survive as a reporter by writing on the game per se. You have to keep the pot boiling - so as to be in a position to call the kettle black.

The hour is at hand for cricket journalism to look inward. Only up to a point can editorial compulsion justify the muck-raking that passes for cricket reporting today. Just pause to ponder about how much concrete proof has been produced by the media in this whole business of match-fixing.

Time was when catch-fixing by Eknath Solkar was the overriding theme of cricket writing. I even recall Ray Robinson writing to me a personal letter for ``highlighting a sadly neglected department of the game'' when I carried (in The Illustrated Weekly Of India) a sequence of six pictures, depicting Ekky Solkar catch-fixing. ``Oh, but cricket is a different ball-game today!'' it will be argued. How different - even in its snazzy one-day version - from the style of catches Ekky Solkar brought off? By a grim twist of irony, it was Kapil Dev's historic lifting of the 1983 World Cup that set the stage for the `operators' to swarm the game.

That these small-time operators soon became the big-money fixers is the tragedy of the game. But tragedy now is descending to farce. Is there no way we can arrest this farce? Yes, there is, but it is cricket `in the middle' that has to come up with the nostrum. Raj Singh Dungarpur's reversing the three letters of CCI to land up at the ICC meet, as India's last-minute representative there, takes us thus far and no further.

Yet there is one positive development. The advent on the murky cricket scene of such a cloutful investigating agency as the CBI has had the effect of scaring away the betting mafia for the time being. Mumbai is the hotbed of betting vice. But the return here (on Thursday, May 5) of M. N. Singh as the city's police commissioner had a salutary effect. The man had served in Mumbai before and built a reputation for being ultra-tough in cracking down on the underworld. So M.N. Singh's entry into the fold could help. But only up to a point. At the end of the day-and-night, it is within the game itself that we have to find a solution.

And Neville Cardus hit the `bail' on the head when he noted: ``Reform perhaps might do worse than look beyond the external circumstances of actual play - a glimpse into character and outlook might be revealing. We have virtually lived into a time in which cricketers, here and there, have to be legislated into sportsmanship.''

Forty years ago, when Neville Cardus wrote that, it was ``cricketers here and there'' who had ``to be legislated into sportsmanship''. Now the game of cricket itself has ``to be legislated into sportsmanship''! Is there a team under closer betting watch, in the world today, than Pakistan? And Pakistan, in this very hour, is in the West Indies, playing cricket at a time when no player, in Jagmohan Dalmiya's glibly globalised game, dare try anything underhand.

I do not know how many of you have closely followed the ongoing Pakistan-West Indies series. I have viewed it in snatches - to see if I could catch any glimpse of foul play. Only to divine that the fear of Allah has been driven into those playing for Pakistan! It is sad, therefore, that the now on Pakistan-West Indies series should, in India, not have been viewed as single- mindedly as was the recent South Africa-Australia one-day face- off. Even now, positively viewing this series, in its last Caribbean lap, could invest us with the very TV mindset we need must develop, by the month-end, to savour the Asia Cup in its cricketing essence.

`In its cricketing essence' I say because this is one tournament that is going to be staged untrammelled by the bookie bogey. That way the CBI's entry into the teleframe is going to have a highly healthy influence - for now. Only in the event of the investigations following a tardy course will the game's `betters' rear their ugly heads again! That is a denouement warded off by the simple expedient of compelling the Delhi Police, straightway, to put all its transcripted testimony in the sturdy custody of the CBI.

The CBI enquiry must go on. So must the game go on. And here is where I consider the setting to be fortuitous - in that the tournament India is immediately set to play is a one-day combat. It is the one-day game that created the problem, in the first place. So it is the one-day game that must find a `spot' solution - as the Dhaka Asia Cup could do. Do not read too much into the tough experience of Mumbai's Shivaji Park Gymkhana in nailing sponsors for its Vijay Manjrekar Single-Wicket Tournament. Shall we say that the Gymkhana was too near the Hansie Cronje event for the Levers of TV, playing a game of wait-and-watch, to bite? But come the Asia Cup and see how each one of them gravitates, afresh, towards being a `spot' telly attraction! If only because no game offers `the cosy gaps' that cricket does to plug a variety of `spots' in an eye-catching row. So make no mistake, `Cricket, Lively Cricket!' it is going to be in Dhaka. The `Yeh Till Maange More' sponsors (before May 28) are sure to re- assess the `spot' value of an Asia Cup that cannot, in the vigilante atmosphere that prevails, possibly be a fix.

But what about viewer attitude to the competitive credibility of the Asia Cup matches? Here is where the fact that it is a one-day tournament is going to be a timely boon. All that anti-mail we got, on the validity of international cricket today, had its genesis in the fact that the prolonged gap following the Sharjah show - ending on March 31 - gave viewers time to pause and think.

While the rationale of the one-day contest is that viewers have no time to think! It is a vision dictated by emotion and passion - Tony Greig has only to say ``It's all happening here!'' and it is a moveable feast yet again! If it is the Tony Greig vintage of telecommentary that has led to the situation of `Catch-22' players by the neck that we face today, this is the game as it comes through, on high-profile TV, at the popstar-turn of the century. Let them, I say, continue to import all the hype possible into the Dhaka Asia Cup, still the viewership will be there.

A querying viewership to start with, no doubt. But a participating viewership in next to no time! That is the beauty of one-day cricket with all those wives and rival girl-friends, Sharjah style! Not for a moment am I justifying such glossy vacuity passing for cricket viewership.

I am just venturing to sketch the telepicture as I expect it to develop - once the Asia Cup competition hots up. Consider this percipient observation of novelist-historian Mukul Kesvan: ``The terrifying thought is that if cricket loses its credibility, people will still watch it - not the sport, but the spectacle.''

The sport will come first, the spectacle after - that is the sobering thought vis-a-vis Dhaka and `Asia', given the testing ICC-CBI backdrop we now have. This Cup is Asia's showpiece. Asia having been identified as the epicentre of the betting earthquake that shook the game at its grass-roots, the subcontinent, willy- nilly, has to produce a tournament that is the genuine thing.

Not only this Asia Cup, but all international cricket, for some time to come, is going to be for real. And it is by the Here and Now that the (one-day) game is going to be spot- judged - all over again! Now that the clean-up has begun on a massive scale, as a robust optimist I see viewers, progressively, becoming more and more - not less and less - believing. The fraternity that is happy only so long as it is doubting will abide, of course.

That is because cricket is only now going through what football did years ago. All that the committed viewer needs to have, anew, is the feeling that he has a genuine contest on his remote- control hands. Viewers, too, have a refurbishing role to play here.

They must learn to see what they see - not what they want to see. In this third light, even Robin Singh could drop a catch. Bobby Simpson adjudged Wally Grout to be the best wicket-keeper he beheld by the number of catches he could recall the man's having dropped, not by the number he could remember that gloveman's holding. Likewise, evaluate Robin's Singh's sustained fielding ability by that one catch he, being but human, let go.

Reading too much into every action replay is to miss the action itself. The luck of the game is such that it taunts us all - players, viewers and commentators.

RAJU BHARATAN

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