Other website sections

»Sports Market Reports

»Sports Jobs

»Tenders

»Directory

»Conferences

Former Pakistan captain Rashid Latif claims he has been told that a “large number" of matches in the rebel Indian Cricket League (ICL) were fixed.

"I've personally been told by some ICL players that a large number of matches in that league were definitely fixed," Latif said in an email to Reuters.

"Even in the IPL [Indian Premier League], every now and again you watch a match and feel that there is something odd happening."

The governing body of Indian cricket dismissed Latif's allegations on Thursday (May 6).

Secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) N. Srinivasan: "BCCI rubbishes these allegations. We will not even react to this sort of allegation – it is totally rubbish.”

Unlike the lucrative IPL Twenty20 series, the unofficial ICL was not sanctioned by the International Cricket Council and most of its players were banned by their national boards.

Latif added that the amount of money available in Twenty20 cricket was damaging the game.

"There also is a worry that players are being paid so much that situations may arise where ultimately the result doesn't matter to them," he said in his e-mail.

"These are not clubs who have discovered them or groomed them, these are clubs that simply pay them a lot of money. There is little loyalty.

"There are so many games in an IPL season – with more to come with new franchises – that the number of dead, irrelevant games will increase and this is where bookies thrive.

"Who knows what their reach is? If the owner of a franchise is approached and promised good money for his team to lose an irrelevant game, he tells his players to lose the game and they don't care because they get paid huge amounts anyway.

"The stake is so high who would blow the whistle? In any case the IPL was resistant to the presence of the anti-corruption unit at the first season of the IPL. Why?

"Cricket has been damaged before when too much money has floated around the game and it can be damaged again.

"Ultimately, in this kind of environment, where controls are loose, regulation is weak, there is enough money floating about to make people weaker and prone to looking the other way, it is not so difficult to see the dangers that are present. It would be foolish not to see them."