Dope threat a reality for gentleman's game now

The mushrooming T20 leagues pose a difficult challenge

For two decades, cricket has been familiar with the spectre of match-fixing, which brought scandals and suspensions to a sport that considered itself a gentlemen’s pastime. Now, though, as cricket embraces the faster, flashier version of the game which rewards explosive power, the sport is grappling with a new threat to its integrity: doping.

In January, Andre Russell of Jamaica, one of the world’s leading Twenty20 players, was barred for a year for failing to file his whereabouts with doping officials three times in a year, resulting in a series of missed tests. Then on April 13, the International Cricket Council announced that Mohammad Shahzad of Afghanistan, ranked the world’s seventh-best T20 batsman, had tested positive for the banned substance clenbuterol in an out-of-competition test. Last Sunday, he was provisionally suspended.

While doping suspensions in cricket remain rare, anti-doping officials and the sport’s governing body have expressed concern that these two incidents reflect how the rise of T20, and the explosion of cash it has brought to the sport, has made cricket more vulnerable to doping than ever before.

“Cricket is a high-risk sport for performance-enhancing drug use,” said Richard Ings, the former head of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority, who described the game’s testing protocols as “porous and inconsistent.”

“I would rate the risk of doping in cricket as high,” Ings added, “and the quality of the sport’s coordinated global anti-doping efforts as poor.”

The ICC, which governs the game worldwide, said it conducted 547 drug tests in 2016 — suggesting that a reasonable proportion of top male international cricketers were tested, although testing is less common at lower levels and in the women’s game. The council has announced plans to introduce blood testing starting in June, largely to monitor the potential use of human growth hormone, which does not show up in urine samples.

“I don’t think you can possibly say drug free, but we are doing all that we can to police cricket,” said Sally Clark, the senior legal counsel for the ICC.

The fear inside the game is that while cricket has had spasmodic concerns with drugs before, it now faces a much more sustained threat, perhaps similar to what baseball encountered two decades ago.

“The ICC and the World Anti-Doping Agency view that the power-based skill set required in T20 makes it a sport that fits a similar profile to baseball,” said Tony Irish, the executive chairman of the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations.

Test cricket rewards scoring runs while taking minimal risk. But in T20 cricket, the goal is different. With matches completed in only a few hours, teams try to score as quickly as possible, with sixes being particularly important. The emphasis on the power those big hits require — over more careful shot-making — means that performance-enhancing drugs have the potential to make a big difference for batsmen. Performance-enhancing drugs also could be appealing to bowlers, seeking to match the increasing strength of batters.

But for cricketers of all types, the use of performance-enhancing drugs has become more attractive because of the sheer amount of money available in T20 leagues. Contracts in the region of $1 million are common in the Indian Premier League. The popularity of T20 cricket has led to the formation of other leagues, too, and all of them compete for the services of the world’s best players.

So where once leading cricketers might have expected to have almost half a year off, now they can play virtually nonstop, moving from one T20 league, and one rich contract, to the next. Russell, for example, played for seven T20 teams in 2016, winning five titles.
“Risk is a function of motive and opportunity,” Ings said. “Motive in cricket exists because selections are highly competitive, contracts involve massive sums of money and injuries are common.” A player who gets injured, he said, risks losing his contract, and affecting his next one.

Effective anti-doping education has been made trickier by the diffusion of top T20 leagues, which sprawl from India, Australia and Hong Kong to England and the Caribbean. Since many players are based in their home countries less frequently, that “makes educating players consistently harder,” Irish said while acknowledging “more could be done from a global educational perspective to prevent issues arising and avoid the need for punitive punishment.”

Enforcement also remains an issue. Despite missing three tests in 2015, Russell played on for 11 months — a period in which he helped the West Indies win the World Twenty20 — before he was suspended.

With the number of domestic T20 leagues growing, it may be impossible for the ICC to monitor anti-doping efforts in cricket. The ICC conducts out-of-competition testing on cricketers who have played international matches in the previous two years. But players who have not played international cricket in this period, or have retired from the international game, are not subject to ICC testing.

For such cricketers, drug testing depends on national governing bodies and anti-doping authorities. Although all 10 full-member countries in the ICC have anti-doping codes in place, there are inconsistent standards of testing across the different leagues. So players in less-heralded competitions could have particular reason to be tempted, knowing how good performances could increase their chances of being picked up by a more lucrative league.