It’s time for the “gentleman’s game” to introspect the rut within

Cricket has long been considered a gentleman’s game. It’s not just that it's a non-contact sport; in the genteel sport, even verbal abuse (sledging) is a punishable offence.

But in the last two decades, the game’s image has been tarnished by corruption scandals such as match-fixing and spot-fixing as well as ball tampering. The personnel playing the game have barely resembled gentlemen in these cases.

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Heads have rolled, and rightly so, for the above-mentioned offences. Superstars and role models have been tainted by unsavory controversies. The young and promising careers of talented players like Mohammad Asif, Salman Butt and S. Sreesanth have been nipped in the bud reasons totally avoidable.

In the recent past, two of the best batsmen of modern day cricket - then Australian captain Steve Smith and explosive opening batsman David Warner - have been handed one-year bans for their role in ball-tampering, with their teammate Cameron Bancroft suspended for nine months.

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One gets a sense that this could be just the tip of the iceberg. Today’s cricket is an altogether different beast from the one that existed till the 1990s. In this time of T20 leagues all around the world, the focus is more on entertainment and business (read glitz and glamour) and less on cricket. And given the huge sums of money riding on not just the performances on the field, but off it in TV shows and advertisements, cricketers are treated like film stars.

Though Wall Street may proudly declare that “greed is good”, the endless material possibilities that modern cricket forms (T20s, T10s or even the 100-ball-an-innings matches) have given the new-age cricketers are a matter of concern.

It is one thing for established cricketers to earn huge sums through product endorsements or other lucrative contracts, but quite another for the less-established ones to be easily lured by the temptations of easy money - including from bookmakers and fixers.

A superstar of the game as accomplished as Shakib Al Hasan failed to inform authorities about being contacted by a fixer. That led to a two-year ban, and reinforces how gullible even the established cricketers could be.

Shakib Al Hasan

Now, more than ever, there is a need to put a proper mechanism in place so that the rut within is cured. Maybe the decision of the IPL body to not have an extravagant opening ceremony in the 2020 edition is a step in the right direction.

It’s time to scale down on the glamour quotient, and focus on the game and its well-being.