Brendon McCullum leaks may have provoked change from ICC but trust remains eroded

We do not know how much players do or do not trust the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) anti-corruption unit, the ACSU.

We have an idea, one that was given further credence by Brendon McCullum, who made his views clear at the MCC’s Spirit of Cricket lecture this week.

He is not alone, nor is he remotely the first to express such views.

Tim May, who was head of the global players’ association, Fica, at the time, warned of a trust deficit between players and the ACSU as long ago as 2010.

Even more than the leaking of McCullum’s testimony in 2014, which is a manifestation of the trust deficit, what was striking about his criticism is that it was not the usual frustration about the ACSU – that it is toothless and cannot act like a law-enforcement agency.

It was McCullum’s description of the manner in which the ACSU handled his first reporting of the alleged approach to fix made to him. He said the ACSU investigator John Rhodes “took notes – he did not record our conversation. He said he would get what I said down on paper and that it would probably end up at the bottom of the file with nothing eventuating.

“Looking back on this, I am very surprised by what I perceive to be a very casual approach to gathering evidence.

“I was reporting two approaches by a former international star of the game. I was not asked to elaborate on anything I said and I signed a statement that was essentially nothing more than a skeleton outline.”

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Later, the ACSU would record another statement, which suggests the first statement was inadequate.

And just how casual that first interaction was became apparent during Chris Cairns’s perjury trial last year in London.

There it emerged that Rhodes had lost his diary that chronicled the period around McCullum’s report.

This is what is most damning, that what should presumably be the easier bit – recording a detailed and thorough statement of an approach – was bungled.

When McCullum first approached the ACSU in February 2011, not even six months had passed from the Lord’s spot-fixing scandal.

Should the natural reaction not have been to be extra vigilant about such information?

If there is a caveat to McCullum’s experiences, it is that they are of five years ago.

Since then, the ACSU has been the subject of two wide-ranging reviews, the first by Bertrand de Speville in late 2011 and then by John Abbott in 2014-15. All recommendations from the latter were adopted in 2015. Some of De Speville’s recommendations were as well.

The result of those two reviews, says the ICC, is significant changes in how the ACSU operates now. During the investigation of a recent case, for example, they made sure an ICC lawyer was present during the questioning.

A legal presence is just what McCullum needed when he first met Rhodes; had he been properly advised about the implications of what he was saying, he may not have had to face his statements being questioned for inconsistencies as they were by Cairns’s lawyer.

The ICC has since signed an agreement with Sportradar, a UK firm renowned for tracking betting patterns and is enhancing its cooperation with law-enforcement agencies in various countries. It has expanded ACSU’s workforce, adding analysts of betting patterns to make a core team of 15.

It probably still needs more.

There are only five regional security managers to cover the entire cricket world, one of who is arduously tasked to cover England and West Indies together.

In De Speville’s report, he had recommended having five more.

The ICC also claim they have strengthened procedures to ensure that leaks such as that of McCullum’s ACSU statement do not occur again, measures which primarily include narrowing the number of people who have access to such information. Those leaks are what erode trust most visibly and it is a perception De Speville had also highlighted in his review: “… information that comes into the unit is not as secure as it should be.”

The ICC will argue that for every leak dozens, maybe hundreds of other approaches, testimonies and investigations remain secret and they are probably right.

But like the parameter for the wicketkeepers, it is the misses that shape perceptions and calibrate the trust implicit.

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