The gentleman's game s no longer having a demure that can be called gentlemanly. With so much media attention, and so much money flowing into the game, and the endorsements that performance gets guiding players, there was always a hunch somewhere that the players may be resorting to performance enhancement drugs.

A scandal has already come into light. It involved that of Pakistan fast bowler Mohammed Sami who was find to have used a performance enhancement drug based on a random sampling that was done by the doctors appointed by the Indian Premier League (IPL) where this incident happened in the first season of the game.

The appreciation that WADA has got from the ICC would spur it to make the game cleaner and get on with faster sampling to see to it that the performance enhancement drugs do not make an inroad into cricket.

Now cricket is being played allover the world round the year and it makes the task of WADA more so onerous to be on its toes. In such a scenario encouragement from ICC should also come in the form of getting WADA offices established all over the places, and its officers being allowed access to take the samples whenever they desire to do so. There would be resistance from the players but it would be better for the cause of the game to have a clean reputation.

One may ponder whether the substance abuse has become more rampant in the modern times, or is it the fact that it was always there but the media attention has become so pervasive these days that a player cannot escape the scanner. Harold Larwood is a famous example. In the Ashes series which became notorious later for the negativity embedded in it, even though he had been injured, Larwood was asked to bowl by his captain Douglas Jardine and he had to take drugs to control the pain. This was also an example of extracting a performance from a player who was not in a condition to play, by seeking the help of medicines and drugs.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

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