azharuddin is an elected politician in india and yet admitted to match fixing/was given a life ban - until the bcci overturned it.

the england pakistan tour should be feisty given some of the stuff that was said by the defendants. apparently saeed ajmal is the only current pakistani cricketer who isn't open to match fixing.

what i assume is that the majority of pakistani cricketers have at one point or another done something illegal. problem being that most don't see anything wrong with what they've done.

There is a huge divide between players with IPL contracts and players without IPL contracts. Take the WI ODI team for example, they have players who are earning pittence for playing and they have to stand alongside Pollard and Dwayne Bravo (and often outperform them). That alone has to make it more tempting to try and earn some easy money when your teammates are millionaires and you aren't earning much at all.

AFAIK you cannot bet on a specific ball being a no ball on the exchanges. And as for making a bet like that with a well known online bookie, you would have absolutely no chance, if you bet more than like £500 on a premier league result market it gets referred to a trader and if it was a smaller market than that you either get offered terms that suck like half the price or they limit you to a tiny stake. You would never get a big bet accepted online for anything like that, at least not big enough to make it worthwhile.

This makes more sense actually, I vaguely remember this being mentioned at the time now.

Yes it does, but the bookmakers generally want to bet on big games/events so they can win more in a bigger market. Big games involve big name players, so the more of these players that are not interested the better. How is a bookmaker consistently going to make big bucks from nobbling a fringe WI ODI player? Maybe when they play India there is enough interest for the odd no-ball etc but there is far less opportunity. How much is bet anywhere when the WI play NZ? All I am saying is that anything like the IPL that flushes players with cash actually helps the cause.

One thing that would help would be if betting was legalised in Indian and Pakistan, but it's going way beyong cricket there.

i'm no expert on betting but as copthis said i think most of the money is bet/made in illegal asian markets where there is no regulation.

of course the ipl is likely one of the reason behind this most recent fixing by the pakistanis given the disparity between what the average pakistani is making and all over big cricketing nations. i can't see india doing them any favours by allowing them back into the ipl any time soon though given the relationship between the two countries. but lets not forget that there has been questions about lots of players especially pakistani and indian for a long time.

i guess it's no surprise really. who can expect cricket to be clean in these countries where corruption is so rife in every other facet of their infrastructure.

Kumar Sangakkara hit another century for Sri Lanka today, which means that he has now scored 9084 runs at an average of 57.13 with 27 hundreds.

When people talk about the great batsman of the last 20 years his name doesn't seem to get mentioned along with Tendulkar, Lara, Ponting and Kallis. So, does he belong in that company?

I suppose the only argument against him is that he seems to make a stack of runs on flat pitches in Sri Lanka (averages 62 at home and 48 away)

i guess as you say there is quite a big differential between his home and away form. secondly, i guess he is never really going to bludgeon an attack like lara or ponting and doesn't quite have the elegance of a tendulkar. thirdly he gets less press than the others because there are less sri lankan press and fans - maybe????

Not as good a player as Gilchrist, which sucks for him cause they are clearly the two best GOAT keepers. This could be my Australian bias pulling through but I'm pretty sure this isn't even up for debate. Sangakara is an excellent player but Gilchrist was just as technically proficient when he needed to be however if the right situation should arise, as it quite often did, could destroy a bowling attack unlike many players in the last 20 years. FWIW because he was a keeper people forget how good a batsman he was - I'm pretty sure if he wasnt a keeper he a) would have played for Australia about 5 years earlier than he did, b) captained Australia c) bump his stats up more and d) would have been regarded as at least as good a batsman as Ponting by the end of his career. In our 10-15 years of dominance Gilcrhist, along with Warne and McGrath were clearly the 3 most valuable payers imo.

dhoni tho...

Gilchrist was a much better keeper than Sangakkara imo, but in terms of glovework neither are close to the GOAT keeper. You should really be looking at Don Tallon or Alan Knott for the man behind the stumps. In a GOAT XI I doubt you need the extra runs when you'd have Bradman coming in at first drop, followed by the likes of Viv Richards and Garry Sobers.

What about him? OK-ish keeper, and competent batsman, plus he seems like a good bloke too, but he's not exactly outstanding in either department. Although he does seem to be able to get the best out of a team full of strong-willed individuals.

Meanwhile in Zimbabwe...congrats to Daniel Vettori on 350 Test Wickets.

but in a hypothetical world eleven you wouldn't mind conceding a few.byes...

imo a keeper is partially just by their batting as well as their keeping ability for better or worse

And even a GOAT team wouldn't always win, and would need quick runs on flat pitches sometimes etc. Gilchrist was one of the best game-changers I've ever seen and one of the least selfish. If he batted like Kallis when a declaration was near he'd average about 7 runs more probably.

Still, Sangakara is a fantastic player and seems right at his peak. I've always thought of him as a smug git but he went up in my estimation after that long talk he gave about the state of Sri Lankan cricket earlier this year.

Yes, hes easily the best wicket keeper/bat in test cricket around at the moment although he doesn't seem to keep much now, MSD probably shades him in ODIs.

There is no shame in being awesome at home, in other sports having a brilliant home record and an average away record is seen as acceptable, not sure why its any different in cricket.

So he'd still be short of Kallis then

He would but have you seen Kallis keep wicket? He's rubbish!

Not if you reduced Kallis' average by 4/5 for having to bat at 7 instead of 3/4

Not letting Gilchrist dominate England's bowling was a big factor in the 2005 Ashes win - he must have only averaged low 20's; (and Flintoff bowled particularly well to him - think he got him 4/5 times)

One final point on the matching fixing - they showed a few pics of Amir's mum on TV last night. She looked like she's never had two pennies to rub together in her whole life and was full of tears for what's happened to her boy. Really sad.

well if its going like to be like that then the goat keeper is probably some random domestic keeper like Darren Berry (he's the best ive seen anyway). Healy was very good as well. I nominate Paul Nixon as the funniest keeper of all time though.

Your right about Gilchrist though, when he started he was pretty ordinary but by the end was very competent with the gloves.

The Badgerrrrrrrrrrrr!

brendan taylor is in some serious form

Tons of match fixing goes on in cricket, but not in the India games anymore they're too big, I know a friend who bets big on games and his bookie was telling him it mostly goes on in small games involving zimbabwe wi pak etc where people are easily bribed.

I was playing a poker tourney in goa recently and there was this guy who registered for the tourney and never showed up, the guy that ran the flush games in the casino said he registers for the tourney so that he can have an excuse for why he came to india in case he's ever questioned but he comes to talk to bookies about fixing games.

It's just that no one cares about Zimbabwe WI or a bunch of other countries so I doubt this is ever gonna come out in the open.

We own a hotel in north india and a few years back a Special Task Force came in and arrested a bunch of our guests. Turns out some of them were running a betting ring in our hotel and we were completely unaware of it. We had met the guy on a trip to Kathmandu(Casino) so I guess we shouldn't have been that surprised. It was all over the local news then.

I was eating dinner at an Indian restaurant in Guangzhou and the owner there was betting 1 Lakh on an India game going on. Amazing how spread out the network is..

come on zimbabwe.this will b some runchase

blew it

i see india having taken none of my advice and seem likely to go into their test with wi with a top 6 of sehwag, gambhir, dravid, tendulkar, laxman, yuyvraj. hopefully india don't lose too badly to australia later this year -otherwise they might be forced to get rid of the deadwood before the england series.

west indies aren't a terrible team and seem to be improving slowly although still suffer from having the douche gayle not being available. should be a reasonably easy series victory for india.

good 2 c all the cricket being played currently - even if england don't play for a couple of months