Brendan Taylor and the illusion of the free meal
Brendan Taylor and the illusion of the free meal
Plus paid subscribers content for Dean Elgar
Brendan Taylor has released an incredible statement about how he was sucked in and ultimately blackmailed by match-fixers.
Read it here:
You have to admire Taylor's honesty, however belatedly. And you hope he can overcome his problems with substances, and get his life back.
Compared to most cricket reporters, I'm in a different position than most as I've worked on the other side of cricket. I've heard players discuss how a group of girls is an obvious honeytrap. And I've had to deal with a player who repeatedly put himself in dangerous positions. Also I've been contacted by the ACU (Anti-Corruption Unit) during their investigations.
But perhaps most importantly, I have been in the meetings that ACU host. The ICC hosts regular training sessions with players and officials to share the latest techniques of how fixers are getting involved.
The problem isn't with the education. They give clear advice, answer all questions and use video testimony from players to explain how these things happen.
The real problem is with how professional sports work and then specifically how cricket has problems with onfield corruption—these two clash.
We have a sport where players travel around the world almost endlessly. Spending time in hotels, airports and restaurants far from home, and then our sport is so easy to fix as there are so many things to bet on.
And you add that to how pro sports work. In one of my meetings a player asked about gifts, "If someone gives me an iPhone and I report it straight away, can I still keep it?"
That is a different world than we live in. No one has ever given me anything of that value for free. Players exist in a world where this is a legitimate question. So many of my friends are players or former cricketers, and they get their dinner paid for all the time. They don't see anything wrong with it because it's been that way since they first bowled a scary fast ball or could switch hit a six.
This is part of being a professional athlete; people give you stuff. Often to pretend to be your friend, sometimes in exchange for insta photos, and then there is the smaller percentage of nefarious shit.
And this is something the ICC have tried to tell players and officials; there is no such thing as a free meal.
But it is a free meal. And it is why the players find it hard to say no, especially early in their career when the money isn't that big, either late in their career as it dries up (see Taylor) or when they become coaches (see Streak).
The fixers know this. And it's this combination of free things and how easily/often our game can be corrupted makes this all so tricky.
Being a professional athlete is the lifestyle, the VIP, rooms, cool gifts, first class travel and huge appearance fees. The cricketers put their bodies on the line, sweated all the way up, took balls on the body, played hurt, and had their private lives written about. They also know a knee injury ends their incredibly short career in a heartbeat.
The free stuff is pay for all of that.
The truth is that you can't stop corruption in cricket; match-fixing has a 200-year history in our sport. And you can educate people as much as you want. But the combination of the lifestyle and our sport means that it's always going to be here.
The problem with the Brendan Taylor story is that none of this is surprising. He was a senior player, well-travelled, who wasn't paid through cricket's flawed system. Then he took a free meal (in this case, a 15k meal) and a bump of cocaine.
He had probably done similar things before, but this one was part of a plan to entrap him.
The problem isn't this last dinner; all the other freebies lead to this. This wasn't one bad decision, but probably a career of free dinners until the last one was poisoned.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Jarrod Kimber's Sports Almanac to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.