|
BOOKS
Player
Outcast
Transcripts
of the match-fixing expose
By
Sharda Ugra
 |
Fallen
Heroes: The Story That Shook The Nation
Tehelka.com
Buffalo Books
Rs 350
|
It
is every cricket fan's dream: to get close to his real-life heroes and
get a bit of star dust on his hands. Brace yourself for some bad news,
boys, because Fallen Heroes: The Story that Shook the Nation, as
the name suggests, is about exactly that.
This is the
print version of Tehelka.com's now famous undercover "sting"
operation in which Manoj Prabhakar secretly videotaped conversations with
cricketers and officials talking about the phenomenon of match-fixing.
The contents
of the book—the script of the documentary made by Tehelka, and transcripts
of every single interview—are available on the Internet, and at the
time of their release were widely circulated and published. Yet the book,
which reads much like a horror story where the reader is torn between
revulsion and the desire to continue reading to find out how it would
all turn out, is compulsive reading.
They are
all in it—cricket's celebrated guardians who knew all along that
the death-and-glory drama that is Indian cricket was at times little more
than a farce scripted by the Indian public's favourite sportsmen. This
is locker-room talk from famous names and it may not make for very pleasant
reading but it is the real McCoy down to the swear words and petty insecurities
that the players reveal through their conversation with Prabhakar and
Co. In fact, the tone and tenor of the unsuspecting interviewees tell
us more about their personalities than Face To Face on BBC!
If Indian
cricket—wealthy in hype and funds but faced with deep internal problems
and a shrinking talent pool—needed a reality check, it is now.
The biggest
favour starry-eyed fans can do themselves is to listen to the voices in
Fallen Heroes and disabuse themselves of the notion that cricketers
are injured innocents. Cricket is injured and it is the cricketers themselves
that have inflicted the injury, whether by colluding with the bookies
or by ignoring the fact that their teammates did.
The book
opens with a couple of articles by the protagonists in the drama-Prabhakar
himself and journalist Aniruddha Bahal—which try to address the ethical
debate and explain why the players did what they did.
They needn't
have bothered. The golden egg was already rotting inside, all they did
was crack it open.
Top
|
By
putting off rolling settlement, SEBI has given punters on Dalal Street
a Diwali gift, says INDIA TODAY Associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar in
