Phil Walker speaks to a handful of frontrunners fighting on one of the game’s key battlegrounds
Phil Walker speaks to a handful of frontrunners fighting on one of the game’s key battlegrounds.
First published in issue 28 of Wisden Cricket Monthly (February 2020)
Cricket edges into the century’s third decade with a deeper understanding of its darkest problem than at any other point in the last 20 years. Two decades on since the Hansie Cronje ‘leather jacket’ Test, a general assertion has taken hold that the game is cleaner than at any other time in recent memory.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that corrupters, lurking in the shadows, preying on the weak – and with new openings through social-media channels – are an ineradicable part of professional sport. The other bit of bad news is that human weakness remains a remarkably resilient concept.
James Pyemont, the cricketer turned copper who’s now the ECB’s head of integrity, is one of many in the vanguard of the fight against corrupters and the corruptible. “We want to do everything we can to ensure that what people watch and see is clean, that’s the point of it all,” he says. “But if people do transgress, then we have everything in place to prosecute those who do step over the line.”
“These days it’s pretty black and white,” says Daryl Mitchell, Worcestershire stalwart and PCA chairman. “Just make sure anything suspicious is reported. I’ve had a couple of messages on Facebook from people I don’t know asking about conditions and team selection, who’s fit and who’s not. I’ve just taken a screenshot, sent it to the ECB and it’s dealt with. I think it’s happened twice. You can’t be too careful. Education around it is very good now and the things that the PCA have put in place, like the rookie camp for those first-year professionals, it’s brought up at those.”
The Westfield case, thankfully still an isolated one, was English cricket’s pitiful submission to a vast global story, the scale and depth of which has only recently been recognised. “The job will never be done,” Marshall says. “But we can successfully disrupt and suppress. That’s what we can do.”
First published in issue 28 of Wisden Cricket Monthly. Subscribe here
