BARNEY RONAY: This is a sad story. As a player Streak was a likeable and wholehearted fast bowler. Strange things have happened to him since, as they have to many members of that fine Zimbabwe team of the late 1990s and early 2000s
I came up with a game a while back that involves trying to pick your most ‘match-fixey’ current cricket XI. You know the type of thing we’re after here. The bits-and-pieces utility slogger with 17 different franchise caps. The guy who played one Test five years ago, disappeared, then turned up looking haunted in an oversized shirt. A 39-year-old mystery spinner with a twitch. A really, really fat southern African.
And now, with regret, we have a coach in the form of Heath Streak, who was banned from all cricket in April for admitting to breaches of the ICC anti-corruption code. It is a startling story.
Streak has been a roving presence since his days as Zimbabwe’s most successful international bowler, the kind of figure you catch sight of grimacing beneath a gaudy sunhat in rigged-up dugouts from Dhaka to Port of Spain.
There are always whispers around some of these competitions, a sense that urgency levels might not always reflect the very highest level of sport. This, though, is something else: a full-on corruption scandal that also seems to raise some interesting questions.
One striking detail is the advances in corruption technology; Streak was bribed with Bitcoins and an iPhone. We’re not talking leather jackets here. Corruption has moved with the times. Corruption has gone crypto.
Beyond this the whole affair seems to have revolved around Streak’s seduction by an individual known as ‘Mr X’, and later named as Delhi-based businessman Deepak Agarwal, which is not as good a name as Mr X.
Mr X spends his time wooing cricketers. It was Streak who introduced him to Shakib Al Hasan before his ban. Following the trail in that case led the ICC back to the more influential Mr H.
The suggestion is that Streak passed on information and contact details. He tried to cover his tracks when he knew the ICC were on to him. There is a kind of gallows humour in all this. Two bitcoins? Really? And a lump of metal and plastic that constantly asks for your password? That’s all it took? Even the name ‘Heath Streak’ has always sounded like a doomed commodities trader in a minor Martin Amis novel.
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But really this is a sad story. As a player Streak was a likeable and wholehearted fast bowler. Strange things have happened to him since, as they have to many members of that fine Zimbabwe team of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Three years ago he tried to have Zimbabwe Cricket liquidated over the governing body’s alleged failure to pay money owed to him and his staff following their sacking that year.
Mr X seems to have been pushing at an open door. At first Streak denied the allegations, then recanted and is said to have shown genuine remorse.
At the end of which he is now an exile from the only life he’s ever known, pretty much a life sentence for a 47-year-old. And this is the other point. Eight years: does that seem proportionate?
This will annoy you if you’re a traditionalist on these issues. It will annoy you if you believe T20 franchise competitions are as robust, as pure, as significant as every other form of sport. But the question still presents itself: how much does it matter, and in what way does it matter, if someone gives a third party peripheral information about this stuff?
Is discussing the details of a T20 game really the same thing as interfering with the flow of a Test match? As a pure spectator it feels like a more spiritual crime. Watch a Test and you invest your time, lose yourself in details, become invested in passages of play, and believe entirely this is a self-contained sporting universe of conflicting characters and opposing forces.
I love T20 and get its complexity. I will watch any T20 match anywhere in the world at any time.
But what is this thing, really? T20 is already a contrived entertainment. There will be sixes. Stuff will happen very quickly. Fixing a T20 game is bit like fixing The Masked Singer. The only real question is ‘were you still entertained?’ It is a product made to satisfy a particular thirst, and indeed to do so in an extremely gambler-friendly form, to the sport’s own commercial benefit.
This is not to excuse or forgive, but perhaps to explain a little. Of course, in reality cricket needs to fight this disease because it will simply overwhelm the sport. In the meantime monetise away. Turn it all into a dash for revenue streams. But it is also worth remembering the fate of the unhappy Streak is as much a symptom of something as its cause.
This article was published in the May edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game