The International Cricket Council on Thursday gave a clean chit to Indian Premier League-3 saying it had no evidence or intelligence of any corruption, despite rumours.
Lord Condon, the outgoing chairman of the ICC anti-corruption and security unit, said here on Thursday, “IPL-3 from a clean cricket point of view seems to have been a very clean event.
“IPL-1 and 2 did not have good infrastructure in place to deal with it (match-fixing), that does not mean that the matches were fixed,” he added.
Sir Ronald Flanagan — who will replace Condon — ICC president David Morgan and chief executive Haroon Lorgat were present on the occasion. Sir Ronald, former chief of the police in Northern Ireland, will take over his new role on July 1.
“There were rumours and vague allegations about match-fixing in IPL-3. No one has come forward from within the Indian board or the IPL or franchises or journalists, players or team managers, anyone with any specific allegations about match-fixing in the IPL. All there has been is a generic rumour,” he said.
He, however, said the ICC was not getting involved in the BCCI fracas. All the “machinations around the franchises” has nothing to do with us. He said, “We will not get involved unless they ask us.”
However, if there was even a whiff of match-fixing being involved in the case, the world body would get involved immediately. “Our advice was and remains that if you are going to have world-class players, Test players, international players, one-day players, who are playing in the IPL and Twenty20 championships, if they do anything daft there, sadly they will take that back into the international game,” he added.
Corruption can never be eradicated from cricket totally, but the days of large-scale fixing are now over, Lord Condon said. “The biggest challenge for cricket now is micro-fixing or spot-fixing — it’s where an individual doesn’t throw a match, but decides, or agrees, to bowl two wides in a particular over etc.,” he added.