Can cricket kill? A few weeks ago we all wrote about death on cricket fields when the Australian Phil Hughes was felled by a Sean Abbott bouncer at Sydney.
It was sad. But can cricket be a breeding ground for murky killings by some unknown faces? The revelations of Delhi Police that Sunanda Pushkar, wife of former Union Minister Shashi Tharoor, was murdered, not died of any illness, have opened a can of worms.
If the police findings are true, why was she murdered? What could be the reasons for the perpetuators to reportedly sneak into the five-star hotel and inject poison into her beautiful body?
Is cricket the link?
It was reported that she had wanted to reveal something regarding the Indian Premier League (IPL), and had even planned a press meet. But she was found dead in her suite while her husband was away attending a AICC meeting in another part of the city.
During the 2007 ICC World Cup in West Indies, the night after Pakistan were humiliated by Ireland and were packed off, the team’s coach Bob Woolmer was found dead in the bathroom of his Jamaican hotel room. There were many rumours about his death, and there was a strong suspicion that he had been murdered as the room reportedly had evidences of manhandling and use of force.
One of the sports reporters from Dubai, who had seen the body, said it was hard to believe that it was a natural death. It was also said that Woolmer knew too many things about the alleged involvement of players in betting, and was planning to tell it all in a book. But he was gone before he could speak out.
If Woolmer was murdered, who did that? However, the Jamaican police had closed the case saying it was not a murder.
Cricket somehow was saved from bloodstain.
Much before Woolmer died, former South African captain and a national sports icon, Hansie Cronje, had died in 2002 in an air crash as the cargo plane he was travelling rammed into a mountain. Cronje, who had confessed that he had taken money from an Indian bookie and been banned from cricket for life, would have had some idea of the bloody hands that controlled the betting racket. It was also said, after sometime though, that the crash may not be an accident.
Former South African captain Clive Rice had said in an interview to a cricket site that he had no doubt both Woolmer and Cronje were murdered. “I have no doubt whatsoever (that they were murdered). Around the time of Woolmer’s death, there were occasions when the entire Pakistan team were all out caught. All dismissals in an innings caught. What are the odds (of that happening)? It has happened very rarely in the history of the game.”
About Cronje’s death, he said: “The automated take-off and landing signals were switched off at the airports. I play golf with one of the judges, and got the final case report from him. I sent the report to a friend of mine who deals with air crashes in his official capacity. He told me how the signals had been switched off. In that respect, the case report was very fishy indeed.”
When drug cartels and betting rackets control any game, players’ life could be under threat. The tragic killing of Colombia’s football captain Andres Escobar for his self-goal against the United States in the 1994 Fifa World Cup is an example. The docu-movie Two Escobars tells us how drug kingpins, like Pablo Escobar, had pumped millions of dollars into football teams and players’ life and how they controlled them by force. And, killed them.
India’s World Cup victory in 1983 and subsequent spread of the game into the Subcontinent households have robbed the game off its sunny spirit of willow and leather. The village caravan has become a city circus—booze, babes and betting have became the flavour of the game. After the economic liberalisation in early 1990s, the vicious tentacles of buccaneer businessmen and the bloody hands of match-fixers have lured the weak-links among the players with temptations.
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