Vohra’s view: Rules must change to prevent secret signals

Bikram Vohra 11:13 02/07/2015
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  • Let slip: Boris Becker courted controversy with revelation.

    A few years ago I was sitting on a flight with a man who confessed in that unguarded way that people do to strangers on a plane, which they would not dream of when in contact with the surly bonds of earth.

    He said he was involved with the sports gambling industry. He never said whether he was a member of the mafia or an investigator, but went on to explain how hand signals are used to indicate betting options. 

    After mocking the efforts of creating cordon sanitaires around cricket players in India he also shared with me the confidence that dropping a game was not the big one. The big money was in what he called the procedural bets.

    Like when a batsmen is in his nervous nineties he begins to delay the game by changing gloves and asking for a new bat or a drink of water, all signs to his back up ‘team’ whether he is going to score that century or not. Sky the ball, get run out, tickle a ball outside the off stump, all depending on the odds.

    He also adds that the player knows his contacts are watching the game and if he is on 97 the odds on betting he will not be scoring a century are very good.

    Tell me, he says when I bring up the fact that none of this can be proven, who checks cricketers for ear buds? Have you ever heard of that happening, not that you need them, hand signals are enough, even the way you wave your bat.

    Clearly, from his viewpoint, you can put commandos around players but you cannot stop the betting.

    He skulked off at the baggage carousel and I never saw him again. 

    So this week I read about the Novak Djokovic and Boris Becker sign language controversy and it all came back to me. Sportsmanship versus gamesmanship and call it as you will. 

    It is not clever, it is just against the rules. If a coach is not supposed to communicate with a player during the game, that is it, period. You cannot use signals, facial twists, hand movements or sign language to get messages across. 

    Just because it cannot be proven does not negate the intent to cheat.

    No wonder there was less interest in the opening round of Wimbledon with the Joker easily ousting Philipp Kohlschreiber than there was in Becker’s facial contortions. What Becker did was stay as impassive as a Madame Tussauds statue, but is the rot deeper than we think and has this revelation added another dimension to the seamier side of sport?

    To many people it would not be cheating per se, more in the realm of practical expediency. You cannot stop communication in toto when a player and his coach are fifteen metres apart. And if such dispatches have become blurred in soccer and basketball, where coaches practically invade the pitch, why should other sports not follow suit. 

    Strategy through secret signals will always be part of the game.

    The doubles in tennis is all about that. So, too, in American football, basketball and cricket, where it is rife on field. Perhaps a bit too much is being made of all this and it is less sinister than it sounds. 

    After all, how much difference can these messages make especially if you factor in a 20 per cent misreading possibility through human error. It’s not as if the player is carrying an almanac with him. Besides which, it would be quite a distraction in the middle of a big match to be interpreting signals. Play hell into your concentration.

    I put my right hand on my neck, that meant go down the line. Oops, my bad, I thought it was your left so I tried more cross courts.

    As things stand, one concedes it is essentially cheating. Perhaps we should just assume that coaches are not terracotta soldiers sans expression, give this aspect a pass and let it be. If the rules are impractical change them.

    There are worse things happening out there in the world of sport than a wiggling of the fingers and a furrow of the brow.

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