ASHES CORRUPTION ALLEGATIONS

Dirk Nannes divulges backdated corruption in BPL

by Cricbuzz Staff • Published on

"Everyone I played with in Australia has always gone 100 percent to win the game" © Getty

The fixing allegations surrounding the ongoing Ashes Test in Perth has initiated Dirk Nannes, former pacer from Australia, into talking about his own experiences with spot-fixing in the Bangladesh Premier League.

"The Bangladesh Premier League, that was the interesting one," Nannes told ABC Radio on Friday (December 15). "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.

"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."

The 41-year-old, who played in one One-Day International and 17 Twenty20 Internationals for Australia, revealed how the security personnel were incapable of getting rid of obvious bookies in the crowd.

"The spotters were people up in the crowd," Nannes said. "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."

To put things into perspective, former Bangladesh captain, Mohammad Ashraful, has earlier confessed to spot-fixing in BPL 2013 - a season Nannes featured in - while one of the owners of now-defunct Dhaka Gladiators was found guilty of "being party to an effort to fix" a game in the same year.

Nannes, though, isn't convinced about corruption in Australian cricket. "I may be being naive, because from my opinion, everyone I played with in Australia has always gone 100 percent to win the game.

"You're talking about those satellite tournaments where there's not as much professionalism is in the game. We talk about that Sunstory, 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."

© Cricbuzz

TAGS