Up to six international cricket teams have been closely monitored over the past decade because of corruption concerns, according to former International Cricket Council (ICC) Anti-Corruption Unit head Paul Condon.
Condon set up the unit after the 2000 match-fixing scandal which led to life bans for international captains Hansie Cronje (South Africa), Mohammad Azharuddin (India) and Salim Malik (Pakistan).
“Since 2000 there have been probably five or six national teams who at some stage have been causing concern and have been closely monitored and scrutinized,” Condon said in an interview published in next month’s edition of Cricketer magazine, which goes on sale today.
“In terms of frequency, probably Pakistan has been the most challenging in recent years,” he said.
Condon said an explosion in Twenty20 cricket had been a major factor in the re-emergence of cricket corruption.
“Probably the greatest trigger point was the explosion of T20. The ‘anything goes’ party atmosphere allowed some really bad people back into the game. Some of the notorious fixers from early years started to re-emerge on the circuit in India, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia and the United Kingdom,” he said.
“It almost legitimized the bad guys being back around cricket again and fixers were even seen in promoters’ boxes and at matches. What up to then had been pretty tight and regulated, suddenly became a free-for-all,” he added.
Condon said Twenty20 cricket “took away the discipline and rigour we [the anti-corruption unit] had been enforcing.”
“I think the temptation was to do a little fix here and a little fix there and still win the match — and they were not seeing it as criminal,” he said.
Condon said the sport was now at a critical juncture.
He said the anti-corruption unit had to boost its resources to match the volume of cricket being played and also get tougher with national boards, imposing a progressive scale of punishments until they reached the “nuclear option” of excluding them from world cricket if they continued to fail to drive out corruption.
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