In cricket, quickies can be match-winners. In the publishing business, they run the danger of being bowled over by events. Last year, with match-fixing allegations occupying yards of column inches on the sports pages, Penguin published Pradeep Magazine's book Not Quite Cricket with all the pace of a Shoaib Akhtar delivery. This year, the book has been re-published to include the Hansie Cronje scandal, which broke on April 7.
Much has happened since. Kapil Dev has blubbered on BBC's HardTalk, Manoj Prabhakar has let loose a series of oral yorkers on tehelka.com, and the controversy has taken a litigious turn. Unless Penguin is able to churn out yet another update soon, the book becomes the literary equivalent of a no ball and gathers dust on the shelves.
At one level, this should not matter since the book purports to be "the explosive story of how bookmakers influence the game today". The problem is that the content doesn't quite live up to this description. This is essentially a recap of Magazine being approached by a bookie in the Caribbean, the news report of which sparked off the controversy that convulsed the game, and the events that followed. The update that prefaces the book is merely a narration of how the Delhi police nailed Cronje and his subsequent confession.
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In fact, there are no new "explosive" revelations to be found, nor fresh insights; only an impassioned, angst-ridden iteration of what everyone already knows. Thanks to Magazine and Outlook's conscientious and exhaustive coverage, match-fixing in cricket is now an over-newsed phenomenon. We know only too well that bookies use journalists as middlemen, that players take money from bookies to provide information, that greedy captains can "fix" matches, etc., etc. In real terms, their "technique" actually takes up about four and a half pages of this 165-page treatise.
What we really want to know now is which matches were fixed, by whom and how. So far, we have Prabhakar's word on one match and Cronje's shamefaced half-admission of another. The rest of the information consists of tantalisingly oblique references that don't add up to much.
Admittedly, as Magazine acknowledges in his preface, tracing the crookery in past matches is tough, since it requires confessions from players and bookies that will be hard to come by, given the officially-sanctioned cover-ups. But maybe Magazine should have made an attempt to probe for some harder evidence to add to the existing stock of knowledge that saturation newspaper and TV coverage has offered us.
Magazine more than deserves credit for being one of the first sports journalists to have the courage to bowl bouncers at the powerful and inept Indian
cricket establishment with his revelations. He also is fearless
enough to highlight the enormous farce of the Chandrachud commission of enquiry.
It's also clear that Magazine is passionate about the game and distressed by the admittedly shambolic state of domestic cricket. These are legitimate concerns, but need we have a whole section on it, most of which consist of inadequately edited interviews? It is difficult to see the connection between the two subjects.
Magazine's writing style also does little to enhance the book. There's a naive self-righteousness that smacks of a schoolboys' magazine. Here's a sampler from the Cronje affair: "I could see shock, disbelief and utter confusion on the faces of my young colleagues in the office. It couldn't be true. Something must be wrong somewhere. The Delhi police must have got it wrong. It couldn't be the South Africans, and of all people, not Cronje."
Magazine is entitled to his shock and disbelief, but should this be inflicted on the reader? A Cardus we're not expecting, but a more critical editor wouldn't have done him any harm.