Sometimes the doctor prescribes exactly what the patient wished for. Two years before the current cyclical season of the cricket circus, the first Indian Premier League (IPL), comes to a close, a committee that had to decide on the quantum of punishment for wrongdoing on the part of owners of two teams, has recommended that India Cements Limited (ICL; owners of Chennai Super Kings) and Jaipur IPL Cricket Limited (JICL; owners of Rajasthan Royals) be suspended. The period: two years. The committee also imposed life bans on the Super Kings’ principal, Gurunath Meiyappan, and the Royals’ Raj Kundra.
Contrast this with the response to what seemed a rather innocuous crime of deflating footballs at the professional National Football League (NFL) in the United States: The NFL fined a team $1 million and docked them their 2016 and 2017 fourth-round picks five days after the release of an inquiry report, which found it “more probable than not” that two team personnel were involved in a scheme to deflate footballs before the American Football Conference Championship game, Boston.com reported on May 19. In 2006, the football club Juventus was relegated to the Italian second division as punishment after it was implicated in the country’s match-fixing scandal. Many more teams have faced similar fates.
In India, cricket is a religion, but action against wrongdoers is sporadic or non-existent. The present “punishment” is intended to be more than a wake-up call, but might not amount to much. After all, people, including fans of the game, elected to the Lok Sabha a cricket captain who had been held guilty of match-fixing. Besides, the silence of some of the most revered names in Indian cricket seems to indicate that the gravy train is as much on track as ever.
This story is from the August 7, 2015 edition of FRONTLINE.
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This story is from the August 7, 2015 edition of FRONTLINE.
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