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Author: Brian Radford
ISBN No: 978-1843 583 8
Review date: 24/06/2026
No of pages: 290
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
As the name hints, Caught Out goes over the betting and other scandals in world professional cricket.
Brian Radford begins with a strong opening chapter set partly in the same room as Lord Condon, the former Met Police chief who set up the anti-corruption unit of the International Cricket Council (ICC). While this book naturally will be of interest to sports fans, for the purely security reader itโs striking how cricket stands as a typical case for the risks of fraud and the difficulties of prevention and investigation. Brian Radford, the journalist author of Caught Out, has also written Taken for a Ride, on frauds in horse racing. He argues that โcorrupt cricketers, illegal bookmakers and crooked gamblers are a curse to the game at every level and it is critical that the ICC does not help them tarnish the sport even more by staying mute when drastic action is needed.โ Page after page, the recent frauds in cricket as lined up by Radford stack up – the South African captain Hansie Cronje; and the Texan Allen Stanford who notoriously flew into Lordโs by helicopter with a case of cash, since discredited as a fraudster. Radford rather weakens this roll-call by including selling of counterfeit sport memorabilia; and cricketers taking illegal drugs, when the โcurseโ as he puts it is gambling and the corrupting of players to do well or badly. Shrewdly at the end, Radford makes the point that players do not cheat because they are badly paid: in truth some of the worst culprits are โworld superstars on vast fees … who have found it impossible to curb their insatiable financial greedโ. One fears that Radford was careful for legal reasons and that the truth is worse than he could safely print.
