Not quite cricket - Pradeep Magazine

The day the Delhi police went to press with allegations of match-fixing against the captain of the South African cricket team, Hansie Cronje, the cricketing world went into a tailspin from which it is unlikely to recover for a while. Cronje's subsequent admission that he had accepted money from a bookmaker came as a shock to all those who had looked up to him both as an outstanding player and as a man of unquestionable integrity who put the game and his country before all else. However, the recent outrage is only the latest in an ever-increasing number of incidents involving the world's top cricketers. five years earlier, Australian cricketers Mark Waugh and Shane Warne were fined by the Australian Cricket Board for accepting money in exchange for pitch- and weather-related information. Halfway across the world, Rashid Latif in Pakistan and Manoj Prabhakar in India lashed out at what they called an organised Mafia that controlled the game in the subcontinent with the help of leading players from both countries.;Fired by a chance encounter with a bookie in the Caribbean, top Indian cricket writer, Pradeep Magazine, who has covered the game in every part of the world, set himself the task of finding out exactly how the shadowy world of betting and match-fixing worked. He interviewed players, journalists, cricketing officials, and even posed as an informer for a bookmaker for a while. What emerged in the course of his inquiry was a story of divided loyalties and carefully camouflaged half-truths, of players who actively participated in match-fixing and others who colluded with them. The malaise was more widespread than he had suspected, and he predicts in this book that the Cronje incident will be the first of many to dent the increasingly battered image of international cricket.;In recent years, the Indian subcontinent has emerged as perhaps the most lucrative arena in which world cricket is played, not less because of the enormous sums wagered on the outcome of very match.