Asks Tony Cozier
When Mark Waugh and Shane Warne were fined by the Australian Cricket Board (ACB) for providing “routine pitch and weather details” to bookmakers during Australia’s tour of Sri Lanka in 1994 (an incident that took four years to come to light), both acknowledged that they had been “naïve and stupid.”
The same is true of Marlon Samuels’s association with the gambler Mukesh Kochar on the West Indies tour of India 15 months ago that has now brought him a two-year ban under the International Cricket Council (ICC) code of conduct – except that Samuels was even more “naïve and stupid.”
In the 14 years since the two Australians were conned, international cricketers have been repeatedly forewarned of the entrapment they face from the criminal underworld on the Indian sub-continent always ready to exploit the obsession with gambling in a nation that deems it unlawful.