Tamper Proof

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

L Suresh follows the trail of ball tampering controversies left behind by Pakistan.

If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had based his crime fiction series on ball tampering instead of commonplace crime, he would have been aghast at the knowledge that he had created the Pink Panther Jacques Clouseau instead of the true-blue detective Sherlock Holmes. For several decades, goof ups and cover ups reigned supreme as the wise men tried to figure out if there was something in the pitch that the cricket ball was allergic to.

The ball was increasingly being noticed in the presence of raucous company - bottle caps, sand, vaseline, sugar-coated lozenges, human nails, zippers and many other objects that hung around in the cricket field, acting as surrogate steroids and enhancing the performance of the ball, making it do things no ball had ever done before. And with this, a new member was introduced to the anti-establishment group, to join the hallowed company of anti-matter, alternative music and women’s lib – reverse swing.

Interestingly, just as cricket has strong similarities with baseball, ‘doing’ the ball seems to have a well-bred lineage emerging from the baseball diamonds where spitballs, knuckleballs and forkballs were the order of the day. While everything from petroleum jelly to peanut butter was tried out to soften up one side of the ball, nail files, emery boards and sandpaper were the choice of match-hardened pitchers who desired the opposite effect. But since those were the days of prohibition, Al Capone and rigged boxing matches and since crime had not yet been declared illegal, the authorities decided to keep pace with the times and exempted some players – who would otherwise be out of a job without the nuances of cheating - from the ban on ball tampering.

Like all popular trends from the West, ball tampering too found its way to other parts of the globe and finally found its calling in cricket as willing bowlers waiting for redemption from the likes of Bradman and the three Ws embraced it with open arms and extra–long nails. And like all outbreaks, the epidemic raged on, but the vaccine was yet to be found. The world was curiously watching the ball get jiggy with it after the first session of play and was yet to make something of it. The ICC and the guardians of fairplay meanwhile were taking to the new issue the way most teams reacted to powerplays – they just didn’t know what to do with it.

Interestingly, India’s brush with ball tampering came along with a brand window as the country was exposed to the multifarious uses of Vaseline, appropriately endorsed by a bowler named John Lever. It was the mid-70s and India, thriving on the fiery medium pace of Karsan Ghavri and Mohinder Amarnath, was yet to see Kapil’s outswing, leave alone reverse swing. Vaseline was found on a ball that creamed the Indian top order as India lost the Delhi test by an innings and 25 runs. Lever ended with 10 for 70 and the officials ended with a ball that looked all set for a cold Delhi winter, slathered with Vaseline. In the end, what should have been the first big ball tampering incident ended up being called an accident.

However, on the other side of the border, cherry-red missiles were learning to swing the wrong way with alarming regularity. The chronicled reports begin with the early 90s during a one-dayer at the Lords, between England and Pakistan - old friends who took out their nail files and emery paper at the very sight of each other. As the series unfolded, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Aaqib Javed were suspected of having done things to the ball that made it reverse though it was not enough to reverse the outcome of the one day series. England won, cried foul and went home brooding about how the diabolical action (a term that, to this day, remains Darrell Hair’s literary contribution to cricket) of the ball could be adapted to county cricket. The officials couldn’t prove a thing, but the fast bowlers of the world didn’t need further proof that wickets were there for the taking – the ball had just passed its first big ‘scratch and sniff’ test.

A couple of years later, Pakistan was at it again. This time round, ball tampering came hunting in pairs with another phenomenon that had an incurable effect on the game – match fixing. On one hand, the ball was doing crazy things that batsmen weren’t able to come to terms with and on the other, the English team was doing crazy things, like winning a one day series against Pakistan’s express fast bowlers. With one side rumoured to have gone after quick bucks and the other after victory, the match-fixing scandal ensured that neither team ended on the losing side. Of course, the ICC played the role of duty bound cops to the hilt – it took them two years to arrive at the heart of the matter after a shocking disclosure by Javed Burki, a former Chairman of the PCB.

A pattern was emerging - with ball tampering fast becoming the force majeure that resulted in reverse swing, and with reverse swing having its origins in Pakistan, one didn’t have to put two and two to end up with a scuffed ball. Meanwhile, ex-players like Imran Khan, Sarfraz Nawaz and Abdul Qadir began trooping into the confession box and narrating the secrets of their success, all of which could only be taken as incriminating evidence against the whole team.

It took the turn of the millennium for the ICC to finally take a stand on ball tampering and pronounce a sentence that had the word guilty in it. The Singer triangular series in Sri Lanka saw Waqar Younis and Azhar Mahmood take on South Africa with a tampered ball. South Africa won the match and Waqar, besides losing half his match fee, became the first player to sit out for a match for doing the unmentionable to a ball. Rumour has it that Waqar thought of appealing against the sentence because he thought he was being unfairly targeted – how else could one explain the fact that when everyone else was into ball tampering, he alone was caught by the cameras for the second time in two weeks?

The Pakistani nomenclature of naming their fast bowlers after express trains did have a telling effect on its leading pacers as they seemed to be suffering from a one-track mind. After Wasim, Waqar and Aaqib Javed, it was Shoaib Akhtar’s turn to turn psychopath with the ball against Zimbabwe, an opposition that was already wilting against express pace. One does not know if he was inspired by the fact that early scorers kept track of runs by making notches on a piece of wood and decided to mark his tally of wickets on the ball, but had the match referee not intervened in time, the ball would have needed stitches in places other than the seam. Shoaib was hauled up, given a dressing down and strictly told to mark his tally of scalps in his personal scrapbook henceforth.

But every epic saga has a bad sequel – and the terminator returned to terrorise the seam of the ball and leave it in a mess in a match against New Zealand. The tri-series played in Sri Lanka was ultimately won by the Kiwis, but the man who was grounded for two matches was Shoaib Akhtar.

Finally, what began at the Lords came full circle at the Oval, when the Pakistan team was accused of ball tampering by Darrell Hair. From the moment Hair removed the bails, it was a foregone conclusion that the matter would take racial undertones. An Australian umpire, a South African match referee and an Asian team have just about the same effect as ammonium nitrate, sulphuric acid and hydrogen peroxide mixed together in midair. But this incident had a lot more than inter-continental strife. Changing the condition of the ball, match forfeiture, bringing disrepute to the game, a 500,000 dollar ransom note, a call to legalise ball tampering, rumours of resignation – it was already being dubbed the biggest scandal to rock cricket since Bodyline.

What was most surprising was that despite being surrounded by men who have all had a brush with cricketing laws during their times, Inzamam did not get the right kind of advice from any quarter. It is during times of crisis that one wishes to be in the company of experienced men who could come to one’s rescue. But when it includes a coach who has seen enough ball tampering controversies during his stint with South Africa, a manager who had come close to forfeiting a match as a captain when he led Pakistan off the field in a match against India, a bowling coach who was the world’s first player to be penalized for ball tampering, a board chairman who didn’t quite understand what was going on, but felt it important to drag national honour and religion into the fracas and a young wicketkeeper who decided that it was the opportune moment to relax and while the controversy was spreading like wildfire, was seen in the balcony of his dressing room, calmly reading a newspaper - Inzamam would have preferred solitude.

But as with all crime thrillers, there had to be a twist in the tale. Out came an e-mail with Darrell Hair’s vow of complete silence in exchange for $500,000 – a shocker that has turned the controversy on its head, transforming the hunter into the hunted and the accused into a martyr who forfeited a match for his country. It suddenly looked like a jailbreak where the prisoners were digging a tunnel from one end and the warden from the other. During his days, Holmes would have found it easy to crack this case because once he had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained, however improbable, was the truth. But there was one contingency that he didn’t have to take into account – what if anything’s possible?

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 03 September, 2006)