how rotten it is to cheat at sports

HOW ROTTEN IT IS TO CHEAT AT SPORTS!

By CAMERON DUODU

Modern sport has become almost a religion to many people.

This is because politics is often crooked and dull. Education reaches a saturation point after which new information is not as welcome as when we were young. Sex ditto.

But sport is for ever exciting. When you are young, you go into it with gusto and try your best to excel in it. There is nothing like starting a race with eight other people and finishing ahead of all of them. Or starting a football match and scoring more goals than your opponents.

Even in later years, when you may not be physically capable of partaking in sport in any meaningful way, you can sit in your sofa in front of a television set and take part in sporting activities -- in your mind!

Sitting around and watching others do it can arouse as much passion in one as one used to experience when one was taking part in the events oneself. In a way, it is even better, for one can get a panoramic view of the whole event, whereas when one was participating, one’s view was limited to just one‘s own perspective of it.

Better still, when one is only taking part in one’s mind, one can be as creative as one likes and shout to indicate how good one would have been, had one been on the field.

“Shoot to the right!…Oh silly boy -- he shot to the left and sent it straight to an opponent. Look back! Look back! Oh --- he didn’t look back and he’s been felled. I told him to look back and he didn’t, and now he’s on the ground!”

Apart from football and athletics, one of the sports I enjoy most these days is cricket. It looks as if it is a lazy game -- long drawn out, with very little happening most of the time, and a lot of the same thing happening most of the time. The bowler bowls, the batsman tries to stop the ball from hitting his stumps; often the ball passes harmlessly by, and is harmlessly caught by the wicket-keeper. And the wicket-keeper gives the ball back to the bowler, who bowls again, past the batsman, to the wicketkeeper, and so it goes on and on and on.

If you do not understand the game, you will think that anyone who spends time watching it is potty, honest! But if you understand it, it is extremely breath-taking, for something unexpected --anything -- can happen at any moment. Instead of the ball bowled by the bowler sailing harmlessly past the batsman, it can whizz past his bat and hit one of the three stumps in front of which he stands.

There are two pieces of wood on top of the stumps and if these are dislodged when the ball hits the stumps, the batsman is OUT! He has been “bowled” and he goes away for another batsman to come and take his place.

Meanwhile, if the bowler has bowled six balls -- and all of them have been “good balls”, in that they have not been called by the umpire as being a “wide” or a “no-ball” -- then another bowler takes over and tries to do what the previous bowler was trying to do, namely, get the batsman “out”. In won’t go into “maidens” and “overs” at this time, but who knows, one day I shall get an opportunity to do so! Right now, I don’t want to satiate your poor mind.

Eleven players on each side play the game, and they are divided into batsmen and bowlers. All the bowlers have to bat as well, but not all the batsmen have to, or can, bowl. The aim of each side is to use its bowlers to get all the batsmen of the other side out.

Apart from being clean bowled, a batsman also goes out if a ball that has touched his bat is caught by any of the players of the opposing side, before it touches the ground. He is also out if the ball hits his leg and is thereby stopped from hitting the stumps. The umpire has to decide this

-- and it causes no end of controversy!

Now, all these things can happen after the ball has been bowled, and that is what makes cricket exciting. A catch can be made by one of the players scattered around the field (they are called fielders) or by the wicket-keeper, who stands right behind the batsman. Some of the catches are difficult because the ball travels very fast after the batsman has it hard. Some balls also go up very high and there is a special technique for catching them which, when executed perfectly, is very beautiful to watch.

So a lot of different skills are deployed in cricket, and many of these skills are not found in games like football or hockey, so it is the complexity of cricket which makes it specially appreciated by its followers.

Because of the peculiar skills required of its players, good cricketers are almost worshipped by their fans. If you have ever seen a guy called Viv Richards -- for example -- bat for the West Indies; or Brian Lara (also a batsman of the West Indies); Shane Warne (Australia) and Muttai Mutalitharan (Sri Lara) spin the ball whilst bowling; or Curtley Ambrose (West Indies) or Malcolm Marshall (West Indies) or Shoaib Akhtar (Pakistan) bowl the ball at about 100 mph and get excellent batsmen out -- the thrill is only slightly less than when you see Ussain Bolt leaving the field behind after only ten paces, in a 100-meter race.

So imagine the anger cricket fans have been feeling, on hearing that Mohammed Amir, a young Pakistani bowler, who took six wickets at Lord’s cricket ground in London last Friday in a match against England, cheated during the game. A newspaper called The News of The World managed to get a middleman to offer a huge sum of money, £150,000, to Amir to bowl four “no-balls” at certain stages during the match against England.

He did play the no-balls. The payback was that if anyone had betted that those no-balls would occur at those particular times during the match and they did, he could have made a fortune. And, apparently, such complex bets are made in East Asia frequently -- mostly underground -- during cricket matches.

Now, in the current case, the no-balls did not affect the match. Pakistan was losing and would have lost anyway, whether the no-balls were played or not. But the big question is: if a Pakistani player could be induced to take money to play a “no-ball”, what other things could he -- or indeed the whole team do -- to satisfy betters during a match? Could they ”throw” a whole match? Could good batsmen deliberately get themselves “out” whilst building up a good innings for their team? Could bowlers deliberately bowl wildly and allow the opposing batsmen to obtain a lot of runs?

The issue has dealt a very big blow indeed at international cricket. There have been other instances of corruption in cricket before, the most notable being the confession by the captain of South Africa, Hansie Cronje, in 2000, that he took a large sum of money from bookmakers in exchange for information about a match in which he was playing.

The International Cricket Council has been making efforts to stamp out corruption from the game since then, but apparently, it hasn’t yet succeeded.

I am enraged by this incident because it couldn’t have come at a worse moment for Pakistan. The country is fast disappearing under water, after a huge flood caused by the monsoon rains. All that could cheer Pakistanis up was the excellent performance of their cricket team against England. Now, that too has been snatched from them.

I am also annoyed at The News Of The World, for if it had not entrapped the young player, he would not have fallen victim to corruption. To have deliberately set out to ensnare a vulnerable young man whose mind would have been on his flooded home back in Pakistan, with huge wads of easy money, was particularly heartless of the paper. What he did cannot be excused, but there is always a giver before there is a taker.

The only positive thing that can come out of the sad episode is that the International Cricket Council will redouble its efforts to stamp out corruption from the game, so that we can full-heartedly believe that the results we see in matches are genuine results.