ICC's amnesty awaits Cronje?

LONDON, APRIL 30. The International Cricket Council's (ICC) two- day emergency meeting here from May 2 may consider a proposal to offer `amnesty' to disgraced former South African skipper Hansie Cronje and others for providing information to authorities about corruption in the game.

The meeting to be held at the Lord's, however, is likely to reject any proposal that the number of one-day games be slashed in the wake of the betting and match-fixing scandal that has broken out with the Cronje episode, the Sunday Observer daily reported on Saturday.

Besides Cronje, three English players alleged by former all- rounder Chris Lewis to have been in the payroll of bookies and cricketers worldwide will be offered the scheme if it is pushed through, the paper said.

ICC chief executive David Richards has said such an extreme form of action may be necessary to garner information required to help solve the problem of match-fixing that has tarnished the image of the game worldwide.

Richards told the Sky Sports in an interview to be telecast on Sunday ``What we must do is get together all the people who have the best interests of cricket at heart and bring forward the evidence, bring it into public domain. We might have to do that in a discrete fashion; we might have to give an amnesty for people to bring forward that information,'' he has been quoted as saying.

The EGM, called to discuss the raging match-fixing issue, will be the second such ICC meeting. The first, also hastily convened, was held in Christchurch in January last year after it was revealed that Aussie stars Shane Warne and Mark Waugh had received money from an Indian bookie ``for information on weather and forecasting.''

The meeting is also likely to discuss reduction in the huge number of one-day games being played, but Richards felt the match-fixing row could not be solved by reducing them.

``To put forward the view that by reducing the amount of one-day cricket you're going to solve the problem - that's not a correct line of thought. I wouldn't support that at all,'' the ICC chief executive has said.

Richards said he was not personally against the amnesty scheme. ``We have one day to clean all this up, put it behind the sport and move into the rest of the century in a fine way,`` he has said.

The Sunday Observer said an amnesty offer was unlikely to encourage players to come out in big numbers with information, but such a scheme could be of great interest to Cronje, who has refused to provide any information despite admitting to being ``dishonest'' about betting allegations.

The match-fixing scandal broke out when Delhi police named Cronje and four teammates in a case early this month, alleging corrupt practices by them during South Africa's one-day series in India.

The paper said if the amnesty scheme was implemented, the `England three,' whose names Lewis has passed on to the England Cricket Board, could also take advantage, though the ECB held last week that there was no case to answer.

Representatives from all test playing countries will attend the meeting, to be chaired by ICC president Jagmohan Dalmiya.

The Sunday Observer, in a separate article, said the amount of pre-meeting sparring hinted at a divide between Asian countries and the rest.

Both Dalmiya and Yawar Saeed, director of cricket operations of the Pakistan Cricket Board, urged United Cricket Board of South Africa (UCB) managing director, Ali Bacher, to retract his statement that he suspected two matches in last year's World Cup in England were fixed.

Bacher was quoted in Australian papers as mentioning the Pakistan defeat against Bangladesh, but subsequently denied naming any particular match and claimed it was `mischief' by the three Australian papers that carried his interview.

- PTI

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