Prediction of the week: The enquiry into Martin Crowe's involvement with Indian bookmaker Mukesh Gupta will be quickly wound up with no further action taken.

Gupta, predictably, failed to front by the deadline given by the International Cricket Council's Anti-Corruption Unit head, Sir Paul Condon.

Gupta was asked to sustantiate allegations he made against Crowe and a host of other international players.

In several countries inquiries were launched to look into the allegations. So far none has reported an outcome based on their questioning of the alleged offenders.

Martin Crowe, who has said all along he was prepared to be interviewed, has not yet met the New Zealand inquiry.

It is unlikely he will now have to go through that process. However, Gupta's failure to back his claims could see Crowe want to exonerate himself and remove the smear that Gupta created.

Gupta's allegations are unsubstantiated by his own failure to give evidence in a duly recognised forum and under any normal sense of justice no weight can be given to his claims.

It may be that the New Zealand inquiry believes there are sufficient grounds to continue but if Crowe was to maintain his story all along that he thought he was writing a column for an Indian news outlet and that once he realised he was dealing with a bookie he ended the association immediately, then there would be little room for the inquiry to move.

Unless the inquiry has any proof to the contrary, and Gupta has refused to accommodate requests to deliver that proof, it is impossible to see how the inquiry could move any further ahead.

As intimated by New Zealand Cricket chairman Sir John Anderson to CricInfo last week, in the absence of any proof coming from Gupta, the ICC and its member nations might best put the whole matter down to a costly learning experience.

They should put in place rigorous penalties for any players engaging in the activity of providing information for bookies or anyone else in a position outside the usual media outlets, in exchange for goods or services.

By doing that, and implementing the suggestions in Condon's recent report, everyone would be clear where they stood, and any transgressors would know their punishment.

The laws would act as deterrents for anyone contemplating nefarious practices.

It has been a dreadful time for the world game and undoubtedly the exercise has been an eye-opener for administrators who believed their game could be exempt from the excesses suffered by other sports. No longer can cricket regard itself as immune and that its participants share the love for the game that Pelham Warner, Lord Hawke and Lord Harris personified in their various writings.

Cricket is entertainment in the same league as baseball, basketball, soccer and rugby. Its susceptibility to corruption is just as great.

The challenge now is to rid the game of the drug problem highlighted in the Condon report and taken further by the Indian Outlook magazine at the weekendd.

To do that the ICC has to be in control of its game in every one of the participating nations of the world.

It must have the structure to allow that, and the compliance of each member nation.

That is the next challenge ahead of the game.

© CricInfo