CRICKET, the “Gentlemen’s Game,” has steadily declined during the past three decades to one of the bookies and now, worse, of politicians. Every cricket-playing nation has become a victim of these twin evils. 

Englishmen who started it all and the traditions associated with it, too, have succumbed to these evils and are now in the vortex of a crisis that may wreck the World Cup series and do untold damage to international cricket.