Most Indian cricket fans were blissfully unaware that the sport they loved was not as pure as they thought it was. Those in the know kept their lips sealed. Occasionally, there would be murmurs about the credibility of matches in Sharjah. But few had any inkling about the extent to which corruption had spread in the game. It was Outlook’s investigative reports, spearheaded by journalist Aniruddha Bahal, that blew the lid off the game’s clean image. Not only were fans disenchanted, but powerful institutions such as the BCCI, the police, the judiciary and the government were shaken to the core.
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Some subject matter is so inherently powerful that it can be mined for decades. And therefore the documentary, directed by Supriya Sobti-Gupta, makes for an engaging watch, even though it’s a quarter of a century since the story broke.
The 77-minute film begins with Outlook’s Bahal getting suspicious about colleagues in the press box passing on match-related information on the phone. Pursuing a reporter’s hunch, he learns that it is bookies to who the data was being relayed.
Conversations with bookies led the magazine to learn that massive amounts of money were being bet on cricket matches. Not just the result of the match, but also its smaller plot points, or what came to be called spot-fixing --- which batsman would get out in which over when a no-ball or a wide would be bowled and so on. And worse, even players were said to be involved. No less an icon than Kapil Dev was accused by Manoj Prabhakar of offering him money to underperform. Mohammed Azharuddin, another big name, was banned for life. So was Ajay Sharma. Ajay Jadeja was banned for five years.
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While making the documentary, most doors of access expectedly closed on Sobti-Gupta, whose previous credits include producing the Netflix documentaries Bad Boy Billionaires and Mumbai Mafia. But she still managed to get interviews with key figures such as former CBI special director Ravi Sawani and former Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar. There also are interviews with Bahal and his Outlook colleague Murali Krishnan, and senior journalist Sharda Ugra. The only cricketer who agreed to be interviewed was Noel David, a Hyderabad teammate of Azharuddin's. That proves that a law of Omerta prevails in Indian cricket.
The documentary shows how bookies reel in players by playing on their weaknesses – be it money or sex. Such was Azharuddin’s weakness for luxury, for example, that he sounds like a schoolboy talking about his Armani and Louis Vuitton clothes and shoes in an archival interview. We also see that however thick-skinned a person might be, if they have crossed a certain line, somewhere their conscience will hurt. When Neeraj Kumar met the bookie MK Gupta in a hotel in Delhi, the latter confessed, “Sir, saari fasado ka jad mai hoon. (I’m the root of all problems).”
