Border 'shattered' by Azharuddin's ban

By Malcolm Conn

SYDNEY, DEC. 7. Allan Border is shattered by the life ban imposed on Mohammad Azharuddin for match-fixing.

Australia's longest-serving player and captain regarded his Indian counterpart as a friend and is baffled how he could have become so mixed up in cricket's underworld.

``I was totally shocked. It was unbelievable that he would be involved,'' Border told ABC radio on Wednesday. ``I like Mohammad Azharuddin as a fellow. To see him involved in this is shattering. How they let themselves get involved in this I don't know.

``We played a lot of cricket against Azharuddin, Ajay Jadeja, and all the other fellows who have been involved.''

Border competed in 11 Tests and 27 one-day matches against Azharuddin between 1985 and 1992 - many as captain - before Border retired in 1994.

This week Azharuddin and Ajay Sharma were banned for life for match-fixing, while Jadeja and Manoj Prabhakar were each suspended for five years because of involvement with bookmakers.

However, now that Azharuddin and some of his former teammates have been so heavily implicated, Border believes that the punishment for damaging the game should go further.

``If these guys are guilty I reckon they've got off pretty well. They could have gone to jail for something like that,'' he said.

``At 38 Azhar's finished as a player anyway so I suppose life's no big deal but just the stigma that will be associated with it will be bad enough. If you did that in the normal walk of life, in normal business practice, I would have thought you would have found yourself 10 years in the clink.''

Shane Warne agreed with Border that stronger measures were needed to deal with such a scourge on the game but attempted to downplay his own dealings with an illegal bookmaker introduced to him by Mark Waugh during Australia's 1994 tour of Sri Lanka.

``My involvement unfortunately in the press has not been stated the same as in the courts,'' claimed Warne.

``Mine was a token of appreciation. It wasn't for pitch and weather, contrary to what the press have been saying. Mine was just to meet a bloke who bet on cricket. `Hello, my name's John, I bet on cricket.' He gave me some money I lost at a casino, which is all well documented, except the press generally don't write this stuff.

``He gave me the money and from there it was a couple of phone calls to wish me a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I was never under the impression that I was dealing with a bookmaker. It was just a bloke who bets on cricket. I wasn't getting paid for pitch reports.''

Rob O'Regan QC, who investigated the Warne-Mark Waugh bookie scandal for the Australian Cricket Board once it was exposed by The Australian two years ago, took a very different view.

``In my opinion this punishment was inadequate,'' O'Regan said in his report of the secret $8,000 fine imposed on Shane Warne and $10,000 on Mark Waugh by the ACB back in 1995.

``It did not reflect the seriousness of what they had done. In Warne's case the fine of $8,000 did little more than deprive him of the sum of $US5000 he had received from the bookmaker.

``I do not think it is possible to explain their conduct away as the result merely of naivete or stupidity. They must have known that it is wrong to accept money from, and supply information to, a bookmaker whom they also knew as someone who bet on cricket.

``Otherwise they would have reported the incident to the team management long before they were found out in February 1995.

In behaving as they did they failed lamentably to set the sort of example one might expect from senior players and role models for many young cricketers. A more appropriate penalty would, I think, have been suspension for a significant time.''

Warne said Mark Waugh had not been seriously troubled since he was named by illegal bookmaker Mukesh Gupta in a recent match- fixing report handed down by India's Central Bureau of Investigation.

Gupta claimed he met Waugh at a six-a-side tournament in Hong Kong during 1993 and gave him $US20,000 for information.

He then met him again during a Sharjah tournament in 1994 but Waugh rejected Gupta's advances. Waugh has denied the claims.

``Mark's a very laidback bloke,'' Warne said. ``He showed it's not affecting him. He came out in the last Test and played beautifully for a hundred.''

Border is encouraged by the progress being made against match- fixing but believes there are no easy ways to clean the game up.

``It's hard to get to the bottom of it. It's one bloke's word against another,'' he said. ``How they can follow the money trail I'm not sure? It's a real slow, tough process.''

However, Border believes the game will be stronger as a result. ``Sometimes you go through these processes,'' he said.

``There is a lot of heartache and drama involved with it obviously but hopefully we come out the other end and regain a lot of the public's support and they know these guys are out there giving 100 per cent - there are no dodgy dealings going on.

``There was that period over the last five or six years when everyone's been questioning results and what's happening.''

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