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It's a tough call: just what do we make of Scyld Berry? Is he cricket's most intrepid investigative journalist, privy to every dirty deal in the game? Or is he merely a pathological India-hater who can't help viewing everything about India with a jaundiced eye? If he fits the first description, he should be awarded the Commonwealth's equivalent to the Pulitzer. Otherwise, he should just shut up.

So immune are we to petty sniping that in the normal course, one lets things go by. But Berry is one of the more respected cricket journalists in England and writes for The Sunday Telegraph, one of the largest-selling broadsheets in England, and when he insinuates that India threw the third one-dayer at Kochi earlier this year, it is impossible to let it pass (click here to read Scyld Berry's article). It was an astonishing assault on the integrity of the Indian cricket team, and, not very surprisingly, it came barely days after the Indian team landed in England.

Berry is horrified that the ICC's Anti-Corruption Unit didn't choose to investigate the match at Kochi, "the same venue at which the late Hansie Cronje complained that `the boys' had not been paid for `doing' two years before."

To quote him further: "In Cochin [sic], Zimbabwe's bowling was opened by [Douglas] Hondo, who had delivered nine overs against England for 66 runs and appeared to have been selected under the quota system for non-whites. Now he took two quick wickets and, according to the CricInfo match report, 'with India struggling at 38 for 2, Sourav Ganguly came down the wicket and attempted to deposit a Hondo ball into the nearby Arabian ocean [sic]'.

"Hondo finished with 4 for 37 and the Man of the Match award. Sachin Tendulkar wasn't playing: he was officially rested for the series. There again, an Indian bookmaker has testified that no bets would be placed if Tendulkar was batting."

Having spent more than 25 years in the trade, Berry obviously knows how to use his tools smartly. He stops just short of making a direct allegation, but his implications are clear. A direct interpretation would read: The match was fixed in collusion with the Indian cricket board - who rested Tendulkar - and the Indian captain - who deliberately threw his wicket away. Now, either Berry has impeccable connections within the Indian bookie community, or he is just throwing mud.

Match-fixing was a sordid chapter in the history of Indian cricket, but there is good reason to believe that it's behind us. The BCCI has done more than any other cricket board to cleanse the system: three cricketers have been banned on the same sort of circumstantial evidence that wasn't good enough for the ECB. Thus Ajay Jadeja stays at home while, in all likelihood, Alec Stewart, hailed as a great patriot in England, will turn up at Lord's for the first Test against India. However, what matters more to Indians is that Ganguly's team, for all its incompetence, is squeaky-clean. If Berry thinks otherwise, he should do better than resorting to innuendo, the cheapest of all journalistic instruments.

In fact, there is a worrying pattern in Berry's writings that could be easily construed as an agenda. Even when he is not blatant about it, he manages to slip in the odd beamer. His dislike for Jagmohan Dalmiya is transparent, and he is perfectly entitled to it. No-one thinks that Dalmiya is an angel, but Berry is determined to prove to the world that he is not far short of complete evil, singularly responsible for all that ails world cricket. Rarely does he write a piece about India or the subcontinent without making a dig at Dalmiya, whose election as the BCCI president last September he greeted with great dismay.

Nowhere was his desperation to involve Dalmiya in every far-fetched conspiracy more evident than in an essay in the April issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly, where he insinuated that The Hindustan Times, one of India's largest newspapers, published Sunil Gavaskar's critical comments about England's negative bowling to Sachin Tendulkar because Jagmohan Dalmiya was on the newspaper's board. It was not merely an affront to The Hindustan Times and Gavaskar, but was blatantly untrue. Dalmiya had quit the board last year. To further strengthen his case of colluding interests, he cited how Gavaskar's son Rohan, "not good enough for Bombay", had been transferred to Dalmiya's home state of Bengal and made captain. If Dalmiya did do that, he actually did Bengal a favour: Gavaskar Junior is now Bengal's most successful batsman and topped the Ranji Trophy averages last year at 78.63. He is not the first "outsider" to captain Bengal, either: Arun Lal and Ashok Malhotra led them for long periods.

Berry's admiration for Gavaskar the player is such that he is given to qualifying Gavaskar's greatness by inverted commas – Sunil Gavaskar, the Indian former `great' and TV commentator, and his devotion to accuracy is such that he refers to Indian opener Shiv Sundar Das as Surinder Das (don't take my word for it, check it out on the Telegraph website: Foster break a lifeline for Stewart, May 4). Imagine what he would have had to say about an Indian journalist if he had called Mark Butcher Michael.

But considering Berry's immense capacity to give offence, this is only a minor quibble. Before England left for India last November, apart from praying that "they come home for Christmas in one piece", he warned English cricketers that "there will be an Indian umpire at one end as the new system of two `neutrals' will not begin until April."

But his latest insinuations have exceeded even his own exalted standards. If we were to apply the Berry theory to cricket, we would have to change the very nature of the game. There will be no upsets and no future for the underdog. And cricket will be shorn of all unpredictability. And India would have never won the World Cup, and Nathan Astle would have never blazed away to 222 off 168 balls after New Zealand had been reduced to 252 for 6 chasing 550. God forbid, had New Zealand won the match, I wonder what Berry would have written?

Sambit Bal is editor of Wisden.com India and Wisden Asia Cricket magazine.

More Indian View
Well done Dalmiya
Down with Sachin
The farce must end
Pitch black

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