Dubai: David Richardson, the ICC Chief Executive has given a clean chit to the Sharjah Cricket Stadium as a venue. At a time when an English daily has alleged that the third One-day match of the ongoing England-Pakistan series is under the scanner, Richardson’s observation has come as a boost for the stadium, which has been striving to root out corruption.
Speaking to BBC, Richardson, when asked whether the Sharjah match was under investigation, replied: “I am pretty positive about where cricket is at the moment in the battle of keeping cricket clean; the level of education that the international players go through now, every time there seems to be an approach made to the players, bearing in mind the unscrupulous people out there, often criminal types, who would try to get to players and to umpires if they can, but fortunately the players seem to be reporting any approaches that are made, so we are on top of it and we are pretty confident that it’s clean but, yes, there could be odd occasions there would be some strange run outs, I have been run out on more occasions than I care to remember. But I don’t think you should be too suspicious.”
Richardson was referring to the three run outs in the Pakistan innings in Sharjah which drew suspicion. About Sharjah which hosted its 219th match, Richardson said: “Sharjah was a long time ago, it was cleaned up and the people that were responsible are long gone, even Pakistan players themselves these days [are] reporting every approach that seems to come their way and I wouldn’t be too suspicious about [that] as you.”
To a query whether cricket is clean, Richardson said: “I suppose that you can’t be absolutely certain that it is but the signs are good, our ways of gathering information have improved tremendously so when we get the odd intellegence that perhaps something might be going on and that’s not at the international level it’s much lower level and then we will investigate vigorously and the fact is that we have just just reviewed our anti-corruption resource and we have improved the intelligence gathering side of things and the intelligence analysis and endless part of it and we are shortly going to be recruiting a co-ordinator of investigation so that he can proactively investigate together in coordination with all the domestic units and before we do that we are recognised as amongst sports as the leaders in that field. The battle is going to be there, we never going to totally eradicate it but we are doing as much as we can and we are doing our best.”
