 Another British newspaper has revealed another blow to Cricket's integrity following
the News of the World's report of the spot fixing allegations on the Pakistan
players. This time it was the Sunday Times which revealed that the International
Cricket Council's Anti-Corruption and Security Unit has prepared a report suspected
players' involvement in spot fixing , which contains the names of some 29 players
involved in the second season of the cash rich Indian Premier League.
The news article also mentioned that the report was based on some suspicious betting
activity in IPL-2. The list of players includes a couple of Australian players
as well. The list, however, has no Pakistani or English players in it, citing
the reason that none of them took part in that edition of the Premier League.
This invalidates the report because, while no Pakistani played in that tournament,
there were many English players who played, including Andrew Flintoff and
Kevin Pietersen. Flintoff played for the Chennai Super Kings in the first four
games and Pietersen captained the Royal Challengers Bangalore in the first
few games, before returning to the English team for international duty.
However the ICC has quickly denied about having any knowledge about such a list.
It also said that the report was baseless, without any facts.
Furthermore, the ACSU was not involved in IPL-2 as the BCCI has employed its own
anti-corruption unit. This was due to the fact that the ACSU had asked for a fee
of $1.2 million and the BCCI found this too high a fee. And also, the then chairman
Lalit Modi had not sought the services of ACSU because the IPL was an Indian
domestic tournament.
However, during the next board meeting, some of the members had expressed surprise
over the fact that the BCCI had not used the services of the ACSU and following
that the BCCI had paid $1.5 million to acquire the services of ACSU for the third
edition of IPL-3 in India.
The BCCI too was taken by surprise as the ACSU was not involved in IPL-2. Following
the ICC's comments that the Anti-Corruption Unit did not need to take any board's
permission to investigate about it, the BCCI said that it would be happy to help
the ACU to take the investigation forward.
The IPL-3 was given a bill of clean health by the ICC, as the ACSU was involved
in that edition of the tournament.
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