Fixing documentary trite and a bit low on facts

Rohit Mahajan

Now playing on Netflix, the documentary Caught Out: Crime. Corruption. Cricket harks back to the days when many of us awakened to the sordid reality of corruption in cricket — a time to grow up and a time to go away. After the match-fixing scandal blew up, many fans simply gave up on the game, for the hurt was too much.

This documentary is not lit by stunning revelation — what it depicts has been in the public domain for long, for a quarter of a century. Sadly, it’s not lit by wisdom, depth and perspective, too. It’s just a chronological retelling of a tale that those of us who were around in 1997, and were fans of sport, know very well, and have heard and told numerous times. Since the tale is well known, that the narrative takes a simple, linear route isn’t a surprise; what is indeed a surprise is that the makers of the film seem to display an aversion to facts — this is a fatal flaw in a documentary.

Mohammed Azharuddin emerges as the prime villain of the piece, and it doesn’t appear to be incidental, for his love for the good things is presented as evidence of wrongdoing. The focus on his fine shoes, the watch, the shirt; ‘fans’ with saffron scarves and flags burning Azharuddin’s effigy; the cry of ‘Azharuddin’, uttered in a notable sequence by the interviewees — journalists, investigators — in this documentary, as if they were naming the obvious wrongdoer… There’s another reason it’s very easy to believe that the filmmakers had Azharuddin in their crosshairs — they also exclude a very big name, Ajay Jadeja. Just how could Jadeja completely escape mention in a documentary on the match-fixing scandal of 1997-2000? The former India all-rounder had been banned by the Indian cricket board for being involved with bookmakers, as were Manoj Prabhakar and Dr Ali Irani, the physiotherapist. The focus on Azharuddin can be contrasted with the treatment of Kapil Dev — the most famous visuals of him, crying at a press conference in 2000, are pure gold for cinema, but they’re excluded.

Prabhakar’s position is bizarre — he was the man who originally, in 1997, had declared that he had been offered Rs 25 lakh by a teammate to underperform during a match in 1994. For three years, speculation was rife that Prabhakar’s tempter was Azharuddin, but in 2000, he shocked the nation when he revealed the name — Kapil Dev! A CBI probe, however, exonerated Kapil but unearthed unsettling information — it was Prabhakar who had facilitated the meetings between bookie Mukesh Gupta and several international cricketers. Perhaps 77 minutes isn’t enough for this vast subject, for the documentary also misses the internal inquiry by the BCCI, on the basis of which the players and physio were banned.

The narrative doesn’t add up and there are gaps; Prabhakar is the hero-crusader, ‘stinging’ cricketers in his effort to bring the truth out, doing the fronting job for investigative journalist Aniruddha Bahal, who had procured top-class spycams for the website Tehelka, and then naming Kapil. Then Prabhakar and Kapil are suddenly forgotten and Hansie Cronje, the former South African captain who died in 2002, emerges as the key witness — the man who revealed the name of the bookie Mukesh Gupta. Later, the CBI and BCCI find that there’s no evidence against Kapil, but Prabhakar is guilty — the documentary doesn’t bother to dig deep into this.

From 1997, as a rookie barely in his first years in journalism, I remember the sensation caused by a story in The Pioneer, in which Pradeep Magazine had written about a bookie asking him to facilitate access to Sachin Tendulkar and Azharuddin in the West Indies. Magazine had even spoken to Tendulkar and then team manager Madan Lal for the story. In his book on corruption in cricket, Not Quite Cricket, Magazine writes that Bahal met him when he returned to Delhi and told him: ‘...we are planning to do a story on this. Your story from the West Indies has lent credence to what I have been telling my people at the magazine (Outlook).’ Intriguingly, Magazine, one of the earliest to write on the subject, is absent from this documentary, which seems to focus more on sensationalism than adherence to facts.

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