Match Fixing in Cricket: From Hansie Cronje to Lord's 2010

The script was written before a ball was bowled. England were playing Pakistan in the fourth Test at Lord's in August 2010, and the agent Mazhar Majeed had already told two men what was coming. Mohammad Amir's first ball of the third over would be a no-ball. So would the sixth ball of the tenth over, bowled by Mohammad Asif. The two men were undercover reporters from the News of the World, and their camera was rolling as Majeed took their money.

Both deliveries turned up exactly as promised. Both were no-balls, and not by a whisker. The front foot landed a good half a metre over the line.

Nothing else about the Test had to change. Nobody had to drop a catch. Nobody had to lose a match. That's what makes cricket's brand of corruption so distinctive, and so dangerous: a fix can live inside a single ball while the scoreboard at the end of the day looks perfectly normal. Fifteen months later, a jury at Southwark Crown Court made sure that wasn't the end of it.

This is our guide to match fixing in cricket, part of the wider match fixing in sport series. It runs from the Hansie Cronje scandal of 2000 to Marlon Samuels's six-year ban in November 2023, and it finishes with what all of it means for anyone who bets on the game.

Spot-fixing: one ball, one market

Cricket is a sport made of hundreds of small, separate events. A ball. An over. A session. Each one can be sold as a betting market, and a single player can control some of them on his own. A bowler can bowl a deliberate no-ball. He can agree to concede a set number of runs in an over. A captain can time a declaration. None of it has to change who wins.

That's the whole logic of spot-fixing, and it's the same idea that crops up in football as a deliberate booking, which we cover in football's fixing scandals. Result fixing happens in cricket too, but the game's biggest modern scandals have been about moments rather than matches.

Why cricket is a target

We'd point to three things. The first is the calendar. Alongside Test and one-day cricket there's now a global circuit of franchise T20 leagues, T10 events and qualifiers involving associate nations. That adds up to a lot of matches with thinner oversight, played by plenty of people on modest pay.

The second is the money. The biggest illegal betting markets on cricket are in South Asia, run through unlicensed bookmakers well out of any regulator's reach. The Cronje case itself began with an Indian police intercept of a call with a betting-syndicate contact.

The third is access. A corruptor doesn't need a whole team on board, just one player willing to listen. That's why cricket's codes make failing to report an approach an offence in its own right, and why so many modern bans are for staying quiet rather than for fixing anything.

Three decades, every format, and punishments stretching from six-month bans to prison cells. These are the cricket match fixing scandals that shaped how the game polices itself.

The phone tap

On 7 April 2000, Delhi Police revealed an intercepted conversation between South Africa's captain, Hansie Cronje, and Sanjeev Chawla, a representative of an Indian betting syndicate. Cricket's age of innocence ended right there, and within days the story had swallowed Cronje's career whole.

Cronje confessed to the South African board that he had taken money for information, though the board's account at the time said it was not match fixing. He was sacked on 11 April 2000. More came out at the King Commission inquiry that followed, and in October 2000 he was banned for life. He challenged the ban in September 2001. That application was dismissed on 17 October 2001.

One match came to stand for the whole affair. In the Centurion Test against England in January 2000, Cronje declared and both sides forfeited an innings, leaving England to chase 249. They got there with two wickets in hand and five balls to spare. It later emerged that Cronje had accepted money and a gift from a bookmaker for making that early declaration.

Two team-mates were dragged in as well. Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams were each banned for six months. Gibbs had agreed to under-perform in a one-day international at Nagpur, then went out and scored 74 off 53 balls. Williams had agreed to concede more than 50 runs in his ten overs, but was injured after 11 legitimate deliveries and six wides, having given away 11 runs. Neither deal came off.

Cronje died in a plane crash in the Outeniqua Mountains in the Western Cape on 1 June 2002. He was 32.

India's bans, and the reversals

The scandal reached the BCCI too, and this is where the detail really matters. The board banned Mohammad Azharuddin for life in 2000. That was a board sanction, not a criminal conviction, and the Andhra Pradesh High Court lifted the ban on appeal in 2012. Ajay Jadeja's five-year ban was overturned in 2003. Manoj Prabhakar received five years. Ajay Sharma's life ban was lifted by the BCCI in 2014. Over in Pakistan, Saleem Malik was banned for life in 2000, and that ban was overturned in 2008.

What lasted was the machinery. In 2000 the ICC set up its Anti-Corruption and Security Unit, headed by Sir Paul Condon, the former head of London's Metropolitan Police.

The bans

Once the News of the World story broke, the ICC moved fast. On 4 September 2010 it provisionally suspended Pakistan's captain Salman Butt, along with Asif and Amir. All three protested their innocence at first, and the Pakistan High Commissioner claimed the players had been set up.

An ICC tribunal of Michael Beloff, Albie Sachs and Sharad Rao delivered its verdict on 5 February 2011. Butt was banned for ten years with five suspended, Asif for seven years with two suspended, and Amir for five years.

The trial

Then came something cricket had never seen at this level. At Southwark Crown Court on 1 November 2011, a jury found Butt and Asif guilty of conspiracy to cheat at gambling and conspiracy to accept corrupt payments. Amir and Majeed had pleaded guilty.

Judge Jeremy Cooke passed sentence on 3 November 2011:

• Mazhar Majeed: two years and eight months
• Salman Butt: two years and six months
• Mohammad Asif: one year
• Mohammad Amir: six months in a young offenders institution

Butt was released from prison on 21 June 2012. The ICC bans on all three ended in time for them to return from 2 September 2015, and Amir was back in international cricket in January 2016.

Essex: the county case

English cricket had a reckoning of its own. Essex bowler Mervyn Westfield admitted accepting £6,000 to bowl an over that would concede about 12 runs. He was convicted in January 2012, received a four-month custodial sentence and was banned for five years by the ECB. He was the first English cricketer convicted of spot-fixing.

His former Essex team-mate Danish Kaneria was arrested by police in 2010 but never charged. An ECB disciplinary panel found him guilty anyway and banned him for life in June 2012. His appeal was rejected in July 2013, and in 2015 the ECB went after £250,000 in costs. It's a sharp example of a sporting tribunal reaching a finding where a criminal case never even started.

On 16 May 2013, Delhi Police arrested three Rajasthan Royals players, S. Sreesanth, Ajit Chandila and Ankeet Chavan, on allegations of spot-fixing in the Indian Premier League. For a while it felt like 2000 all over again. The case grew at speed, and Delhi Police went on to file a 6,000-page chargesheet against 42 people.

Then it unravelled in court. In July 2015, the Patiala House court in Delhi discharged all 36 accused who came before it, Sreesanth, Chandila and Chavan among them. An appeal against that discharge went to the Delhi High Court.

The BCCI hadn't waited. Acting under its own rules, it handed Sreesanth and Chavan life bans in September 2013, Amit Singh five years and Siddharth Trivedi one year, and banned Chandila for life in January 2016. In July 2015, the Lodha Committee suspended the franchise owners of Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals for two years.

The life bans didn't stick. In March 2019 the Supreme Court of India set aside Sreesanth's life ban and sent the question of punishment back, with the BCCI's ombudsman asked to decide it the following month. The BCCI lifted Chavan's ban in June 2021 and Chandila's in February 2023.

No case shows the gap between a criminal court and a sporting body more starkly. The criminal case was discharged. The board banned players anyway. Then the life bans were unpicked, one by one.

The 2017 Pakistan Super League

The PSL case is a rare one: the organisers let a match go ahead to see what would happen. On 10 February 2017, straight after the opening match of the 2017 tournament, the PCB's anti-corruption unit suspended Sharjeel Khan and Khalid Latif. PSL chairman Najam Sethi said they had the evidence beforehand but waited until the match was played to see whether the commitments to the bookmakers were fulfilled.

Both players contested the charges, and both were banned by a PCB tribunal: Sharjeel for five years in August 2017 on five counts, Latif for five years plus a fine in September 2017. Nasir Jamshed was provisionally suspended on 13 February 2017 and arrested the same day by the UK's National Crime Agency. He was banned for ten years in August 2018, and in February 2020 he was jailed for 17 months after pleading guilty in the UK.

Smaller leagues, bigger risks

Some of the longest bans in cricket have come out of the franchise and associate game. South Africa's Gulam Bodi was banned for 20 years for attempting to fix matches in the Ram Slam T20. Bangladesh's Mohammad Ashraful got eight years, three of them suspended, for fixing in the 2013 Bangladesh Premier League. In 2021, five UAE players, Shaiman Anwar and Mohammad Naveed among them, received bans of five to eight years for attempting to fix at the T20 World Cup Qualifier in April 2019.

The women's game has had its first case too. Bangladesh's Shohely Akhter became the first woman banned for corruption, for five years, after offering a team-mate 2 million taka in Facebook voice notes to spot-fix at the 2023 Women's T20 World Cup. The team-mate said no and reported it to the ICC. Good for her.

Lou Vincent

Former New Zealand batter Lou Vincent is one of the few who said it himself. An ICC investigation was reported in December 2013, and in June 2014 the Bangladesh Cricket Board banned him for three years for failing to report an approach. On 1 July 2014 he accepted that he had been involved in match fixing on many occasions, and the ECB banned him for life. On 8 December 2023 his ban from domestic cricket was lifted. His international ban stayed in place.

Chris Cairns: cleared

Chris Cairns was cleared. At the end of November 2015, after a nine-week trial at Southwark Crown Court, a jury found him not guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice. The charges grew out of the libel claim Cairns brought in 2012 against Lalit Modi, who had accused him of match-fixing in a 2010 tweet.

Cairns denied any involvement throughout, and his lawyer Andrew Fitch-Holland was acquitted alongside him. An accusation on social media is not a finding, and a jury verdict is the end of the matter. Cairns belongs in this story for one reason only: he's a reminder of how high the bar of proof sits, and how much damage an allegation can do on the way there.

"You'll never entirely eradicate fixing."
— Sir Paul Condon, the first head of the ICC's anti-corruption unit, to Cricinfo in July 2010

He said that weeks before the Lord's story broke, and it reads as realism, not surrender. Cricket's anti-corruption codes, run by the ICC, the national boards and bodies such as the PCB and the Emirates Cricket Board, ban fixing outright. They also ban betting on the outcome, accepting a bribe, failing to disclose an approach or a gift, failing to cooperate with an investigation and obstructing one. Our guide to how betting integrity units catch fixers covers the wider monitoring picture.

How the big cases broke

Line up how cricket's big cases actually surfaced and a pattern jumps out. Cronje fell to a police phone intercept. Lord's was a newspaper sting. The IPL and PSL cases brought arrests in the middle of a tournament, with the National Crime Agency arresting Jamshed on the same day the PCB suspended him. Shohely Akhter was caught because the player she approached reported it.

Failure to report: Shakib and Samuels

In the modern game the sharpest tool in enforcement is the disclosure rule. On 29 October 2019, the ICC banned Bangladesh's Shakib Al Hasan for two years, one of them suspended, after he accepted three charges of failing to disclose corrupt approaches, relating to a tri-series with Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe in January 2018 and an IPL match in 2018. He admitted the charges, agreed the sanction and returned on 29 October 2020. He was not accused of fixing anything.

Marlon Samuels was banned for six years from 11 November 2023, after an independent tribunal found him guilty of four offences under the Emirates Cricket Board's code, linked to the Abu Dhabi T10 in 2019. They were failing to disclose a gift, failing to disclose hospitality worth US$750 or more, failing to cooperate and obstructing the investigation by concealing information. The ICC's Alex Marshall said Samuels "knew exactly what his obligations were". Again, no fixed match was found.

Punishments run from six months for Gibbs and Williams all the way to life bans, with failure-to-report cases typically drawing one to three years. Prison only follows when a state prosecution succeeds, as it did for Butt, Asif, Amir, Majeed, Westfield and Jamshed.

Look at where cricket's cases happened and the map is telling. The Lord's fix came in a Test, but most of the rest played out in franchise T20s, domestic competitions and associate qualifiers, where scrutiny is thinner and markets on single balls and overs are the easiest to target.

The line between fixing and everything else matters just as much. In the 1981 Ashes, Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh bet on England at 500-1 in the Headingley Test and won £7,500. There has never been any suggestion they deliberately under-performed, though critics have argued that the lack of censure helped pave the way for the scandals that followed. In 1994, Shane Warne and Mark Waugh took money from a bookmaker for pitch and weather information on a tour of Sri Lanka. The Australian Cricket Board fined them in 1995 but only made it public in 1998. No fixing was alleged. Ball-tampering, likewise, is a conduct offence, not fixing.

If you bet on cricket, our view is simple. Stick to licensed bookmakers and the main markets, where the rules are clear, which is the ground our cricket betting guide for the IPL, Tests and T20s covers. Be wary of heavy, unexplained money in tiny markets on obscure matches, and give over-by-over specials in low-profile leagues the widest berth. If a market you've bet on ever gets caught up in an investigation, check your bookmaker's house rules on how those bets are handled.

Cricket's integrity fight has come a long way since a phone tap in Delhi in April 2000. The game now has a dedicated anti-corruption unit, codes that punish silence as well as fixing, and players like Shohely Akhter's team-mate who say no and pick up the phone. It also has courts that clear people, as a jury cleared Chris Cairns in November 2015. A system that can tell those cases apart is one worth trusting, and we do.

• The fix lives in the moment, not the result. Lord's 2010 needed two no-balls and nothing else, which is why ball-by-ball markets deserve the closest scrutiny.
• Small leagues carry the biggest risk. The Ram Slam, BPL, PSL and associate qualifier cases all came from below the top level of international cricket.
• A ban is not a conviction. The IPL 2013 criminal case was discharged in July 2015, and Azharuddin's life ban was lifted in 2012.
• Silence is punished. Shakib and Samuels were banned for failing to report or disclose, not for fixing, and that line matters.
• Betting isn't fixing. Lillee and Marsh's 500-1 punt in 1981 was a lapse of judgement, not a fixed match.
• Licensed books protect you. Clear house rules on big markets are worth more than a slightly better price on an over in an obscure league.

Related guides

• Match Fixing in Sport: How It's Done, Famous Cases and Every Sport Hit
• Snooker Match Fixing: The Scandals That Shook the Baize
• Match Fixing in Esports: CS, StarCraft and the Integrity Fight
• Match Fixing in Baseball: The Black Sox, Pete Rose and Prop-Bet Probes
• Match Fixing in Horse Racing: Ringers, Stopped Rides, Doping and the Famous Cases

18+. Please gamble responsibly. For free, confidential support visit BeGambleAware.org. Spotted something suspicious in a cricket market? Report it to the ICC's Anti-Corruption Unit or the sport's governing body, and tell your bookmaker.