MARK Taylor was unfazed by the latest Pakistani match-fixing scandal and admits he has doubts about the Sydney Test Australia won so remarkably in January.
The former Australian captain has seen and heard it all before.
Almost from the moment he took over as skipper from Allan Border in 1994 Taylor was forced to confront cricket's stench of corruption. It lingered through his reign.
Like a disease, Taylor believes it will be impossible to stamp out. The best cricket can do is control it.
"Unfortunately it's a part of sport. It's a part of all sport. It comes and goes. It happened in my time as a captain unfortunately. It's a slur on the game," Taylor said at the SCG yesterday after launching a special membership club named in his honour.
Taylor made no effort to play down questions about the validity of Australia's come-from-behind victory in the second Test at the SCG last summer.
"You certainly hope there wasn't corruption involved. Those things cross your mind, there's no doubt about that," he said.
Taylor could not fathom what was going on as Australia attempted to bat itself out of a seemingly hopeless position.
"As a former captain and commentator of the game you don't always get it right either but from my point of view watching that Test in Sydney I thought the tactics were strange," he told The Australian. "Mike Hussey coming into that innings wasn't playing that well and ended up making a hundred (134 not out) so to give him runs the way they gave him runs I thought was strange."
Taylor admitted that modern captains are more defensive than their counterparts a decade or more ago, which may explain what Pakistan was trying to do.
"I really hope for the game's sake the game wasn't thrown," he said.
"I don't think it was. I just think the tactics were that poor it gave Australia a chance to win it."
Australians were so naive about match-fixing and illegal betting two decades ago that when Taylor was vice-captain he had no idea Dean Jones was offered $US50,000 by a bookmaker during the 1992 tour of Sri Lanka and knocked it back. Jones reported it to the team manager, who failed to put it in his report.
It was only after an unlikely victory against Pakistan during a one-day tour of Sri Lanka in 1994 that Taylor and the team heard suggestions of match-fixing. In the match Australia struggled to 7-179 from its 50 overs and Pakistan managed just 9-151. Opposing captain Salim Malik scored 22 off 51 balls. Six years later he was suspended for life for match-fixing.
"After we won the game and were high-fiving each other I heard, and I can't remember where from, that Pakistan didn't want to win that game," recalled Taylor.
"Once again it was rumours and innuendo. That was the first time I was aware that maybe we won a game that the opposition team weren't trying to win."
I covered a match-fixing hearing at the Lahore High Court in 1998, during Taylor's second tour to the country as captain, when evidence was given that former Pakistani one-day player Salim Pervez confessed he had given Malik and leg-spinner Mushtaq Ahmed $US100,000 to throw that match.
The team flew straight to Pakistan and Taylor was confronted squarely with cricket's dark side. Malik rang Shane Warne and Tim May in their room and offered six-figure sums for the pair to bowl badly on the last day.
Later in the tour Malik approached Mark Waugh at a gala reception for the teams and was offered a six-figure sum to fail in a one-day match. All the approaches were rejected.
"From that moment on there became an education process," said Taylor.
It was reinforced when in early 1995 Waugh and Warne were confronted and admitted taking money from an illegal bookmaker for information during that 1994 Sri Lanka tour.
Waugh introduced Warne to the bookie "John", who turned out to be Mukesh Gupta, the same bookie who corrupted Hansie Cronje in 1996.
"Obviously with the Mark Waugh, Shane Warne incident, players started to become much more aware," Taylor said. "It became less of an in-house issue and more of a 'hey, this can happen to you, be aware of it and let's try and deal with it'."
Warne and Waugh were fined by the Australian Cricket Board at the airport before the team flew out to the West Indies in 1995 and it was covered up until The Australian exposed it in late 1998.
