A former Australian cricketer has aired his suspicion about the chances of spot-fixing in the just-concluded Bangladesh Premier League (BPL) T20 tournament.
According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, the suspicion of former fast bowler Dirk Nannes crystalised as the British tabloid The Sun published a report on Friday naming two alleged Indian fixers who boasted that they could play their role in spot-fixing.
Former Indian state cricketer Sobers Joban and Priyank Saxena, a bookmaker and businessman respectively, were quoted as saying that they could arrange fixes on the Indian Premier League and the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL).
They said they could provide full "scripts" for the latter for £175,000 ($305,000).
Joban and Saxena, in secretly recorded video in Delhi and Dubai also said they could arrange for parts of the third Ashes Test in Perth as well as Big Bash League games to be fixed using a figure they called The Silent Man, who had connections with current and former internationals and had players working for him as "puppets".
They claimed that a former Australian cricketer and an Australian administrator had passed on information on games in the BBL that could be sold, and that "three to four" games in the upcoming Twenty20 tournament would be fixed.
Nannes, who played 18 limited-overs game for Australia, revealed on Friday that during his stint in the BPL, an event that began in 2012, he had suspected that spot-fixing was rife.
"There were a few games I watched on television when I played in the Bangladesh Premier League, and you could hear the players on the ground yelling at the batsman because you saw it was flat-out wrong. The security guys knew it, the guys on the ground knew it, everybody knew it," Nannes told ABC Grandstand.
"The Bangladesh Premier League, that was the interesting one. The first time there were owners who'd come along. The owners weren't allowed on the ground, but there would be a team manager going to the owner and saying, 'What are we doing next', then going to the coach. The security guys were saying enough was enough. But it just kept going on. The owners were sitting there on the phone. The owners were demanding that they be in constant touch with the coach because that's why they bought the team.
"The spotters were people up in the crowd. They'd have a microphone in the cuff of their shirt, and 10 mobile phones around their waist. Anytime something happened, they'd lift their sleeve and speak into the microphone, and have time to do whatever they were doing. Security couldn't do anything except kick them out. Actually in Bangladesh they couldn't even do that."
Former Bangladesh captain Mohammad Ashraful in 2014 admitted to fixing matches the previous year while playing for Dhaka Gladiators in the BPL. Another ex-international Shariful Haque was found guilty of spot-fixing in the competition in 2012.
Nannes, however, finds it difficult to believe that Australian players would be tied up in corruption.
"You're talking about those satellite tournaments where there's not as much professionalism is in the game," he said. "We talk about that Sun story, some of the Australian players are getting five million or more. They're talking about 60 grand? Then you've got to split it. [Players] would never go anywhere near that.
"I may be being naïve, because from my opinion, everyone I played with in Australia has always gone 100 per cent to win the game."
The father of Sobers Joban, one of the alleged fixers, meanwhile, spoke out on the fixing scandal on Friday.
"My son used to organise matches in Delhi. Maybe he met someone there, how would I know?" Baljit Singh Joban, who runs a cricket coaching centre in Delhi, was quoted by the Indian Express as saying on Friday.
"Now that the ICC is investigating the case, let's wait. If he has done something wrong, let them hang him. I asked him this morning about the incident and he said he had not done anything wrong. He's a grown-up, I can't advise him."
Joban's father said he was living with him and his playing career had been cut short since being caught up in an eligibility scandal in which players gained access to fake certificates in order to represent Himachal Pradesh in the Ranji Trophy, India's domestic first-class competition.