The human cost of fixing: An interview with Mervyn Westfield

Mervyn Westfield’s voice wavers. He bites his bottom lip and looks up at the ceiling. He has just been reminded of the first time he saw his father cry. And it was his fault. The former Essex player told him he was guilty of deliberately bowling badly for money. Paid in cash by an Indian betting syndicate. Match-fixing. All those hours in the back garden teaching the six-year-old Mervyn in-swing had been wasted.

“I don’t show my emotions,” Westfield had boasted earlier. Watch him in the 11-minute video, released in September by the Professional Cricketers’ Association about why he underperformed  in a one-day match for Essex against Durham in September 2009, and you would believe such a statement.

But during a three-hour interview in a stuffy meeting room at Frenford Clubs in Redbridge, east London, the 25-year-old former fast bowler is a harrowing, heartbreaking subject. He is the human cost of fixing. Tears well in his eyes as he relives how he became the first cricketer to be convicted of such a crime. How he went from playing for England under-19s, a glittering career ahead of him, to working at Tesco in Barking. Westfield is a shelf stacker now.

“I ruined my life, it’s as harsh as that,” he says. “I’ve been banned from playing professionally until 2017. But I know my career is over. I’ll be 29 then. Who would want me with my history?”

In the video Westfield does not talk about how he feared for his life sharing a cell with a double murderer in the highest-security prison in Europe. He does not talk about how he felt that the cricket authorities, including the PCA, washed their hands of him when he was released. 

Nor does he tell, in his soft, painfully introverted style, how ECB legal representatives banged on the home of his parent’s house in the small hours when his father was recovering from cancer surgery, demanding he testify against Danish Kaneria, the Pakistan spinner who was banned for life for grooming Westfield.

What also fails to make the final cut is his insistence that “someone in the ECB, Essex, PCA or whoever” knew that Kaneria was a threat to vulnerable, impressionable cricketers, yet he was allowed to play.

The pariah turned preacher is still a potent weapon as English cricket tries to prevent players from falling prey to punters and bookmakers trying to manipulate televised matches on the illegal Indian betting market. 

No-one would want to end up like Westfield. It is an uncomfortable truth that he has been stage-managed by the fixers and authorities alike. A victim moulded for their own gain and to the hell with the consequences. 

If it sounds as though Westfield covets sympathy, he does not. Good Lord, no. He is contrite, ashamed. 

Almost every answer he gives finishes with a doleful look, an apology, or, several times “I’m just an idiot...got what I deserved.” Throughout the interview he makes reference to a lack of intelligence.

He is happiest when discussing the early days, playing for Wanstead under-9s with his dad watching from the boundary. “My dad’s from St Vincent, just a little island in the Caribbean. I just wanted to bowl fast. To knock people’s heads off. Like Walsh, Ambrose or Holding.” He flashes a white smile. “Yeah, even at the age of six that’s what I wanted to do. People told me I was rapid, but not so fast when I started playing for Wanstead men’s teams at 13.”

His rise was quick. Four years later Westfield made his debut for Essex against Durham. Ronnie Irani, the captain, had seen him bowl in the nets. “Have we just signed Sylvester Clarke?” he asked Darren Gough. 

“My dad liked that,” Westfield says. “Before I never really thought about becoming a professional. Some people from a young age dream of it. Not me. I was all about loving the game.

“When I played against Durham I was nervous – I was still in college then. It was a big thing for me. Ronnie saw something in me. He thought I could perform at that high level and I wanted to show everyone that I could.”

And yet, when asked “you must have been an excellent player at 17?”, his reaction is telling. “I’m not one those people who thinks ‘I’m good’. If someone says ‘are you good?’ I’d say ‘I’m OK’. I’m shy. Not very confident.” As silence is left to linger he looks down, picks at his fingers and retreats into his chair. Over the rest of our time together he shrinks further, reducing a 6ft frame to a husk as he slowly starts to talk of how his life unravelled.

It was most likely this debilitating, palpable insecurity that first attracted the predatory Kaneria. Westfield was 21 when the Pakistani began to manipulate him but they first played together when he was just 18. Essex team-mates claimed Kaneria was always joking about match-fixing but no-one took him seriously. Westfield, who was in and out of the first XI at the time, desperate to be liked and flattered by the attention of a superstar, tragically did.

“He’s a world star and he’s wanting to speak to me? And obviously he wanted to spend time with me. ‘He really likes me’, I thought. ‘I’m young, I’m no one compared to him’. You’re going to be excited by stuff like that. I was in awe of him. He had been compared to Shane Warne.

“The first approach about fixing he made was at his house a few weeks before the Durham game. He had two friends there from Pakistan and India.  He introduced me. He asked if we could talk outside. That was the first time he told me.

“He made it out like it was … I don’t know … like a normal sort of thing. I was confused. My head was all over the place. I forgot about it and just thought that was it.”

It wasn’t. Soon after the two friends of Kaneria spoke with Westfield at an Essex net session. “They explained it a bit more. ‘It’s easy. No-one’s going to find out. You’ve nothing to worry about’. But I still didn’t say I was going to do it.” However, in a classic grooming technique they had been taking him out for dinner and drinks. They made sure he paid for nothing. Westfield was in their debt and on September 4, the eve of the 40-over match against Durham, he was in Kaneria’s hotel room with the two friends. One of them could have been Arun Bhatt, a Delhi bookmaker who the ICC had warned Kaneria about fraternising.

“They started to put pressure on me,” Westfield says. “They said ‘you have to do it because we’ve put money on it and you’re going to make a lot of people unhappy’ in where ever it was. Obviously you look up to this person, you feel pressurised because you’re in someone else’s room. I said ‘no, no, no’ but they wouldn’t take no for an answer. This went on for two-three hours. I didn’t want to upset them. I wanted to be accepted.”

Westfield returned to his room. “I felt like shit,” he says. “I didn’t know what to do. I thought if I told someone they wouldn’t understand.” That mental image of a young man alone and confused without a friend to talk should haunt the game. If only he’d have phoned his dad.

“I don’t know why I didn’t call him. He would’ve kicked my arse that’s for sure but that wasn’t the reason. I wish I had spoken to him that night, anyone. But I even lied to my parents for two years about this whole thing... didn’t tell them. I lied to my own parents for two years and said I didn’t do it...” Westfield, letting his mouth run away from the chronology of the story, says this as if he is admonishing himself. He shrivels a little more. His eyes go glassy. He looks like a boy.

“It was eating me inside. I’d lied for so long. I just thought they needed to know. Obviously if I did end up going to prison they’d say ‘why’? They were both sitting there crying. I just came out with it one day at home. That was the hardest day of my life, the worst day of my life.”

The morning of the match Westfield said he felt sick, although by the time of his first over he claims he had resolved not to carry out the fix. He was supposed to concede at least 12 runs in the over but despite four wides and two no-balls, he went for ten runs. “I never looked at the scoreboard once,” he says. “I knew from ball one I wasn’t going to do it.” A convenient excuse? “People will say what they want. Ian Blackwell [the batsman] is a good player. I had problems with my accuracy. Always did. But it doesn’t matter, I did wrong.”

His mistake was taking the money. When Essex returned at 3am to Chelmsford having won the match, Kaneria drove Westfield home and handed him a bag containing £6,000. When he recounts this part of the story I get the urge to shake him and shout ‘Why did you take it Merv? Why?’ Was he that obsessed with money that he would jeopardise a whole career for the sake of six grand?

He bristles. “No. I couldn’t care less about money. I wasn’t in to flash cars or Louis Vuitton. My lifestyle was cinema and McDonalds. I don’t know why I took it. I said to Danish that I didn’t concede 12 runs, that I didn’t keep the bargain. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. I never spent it. It was just there in my house. Never touched it. That’s what people don’t understand. The police collected it. I gave it all back.”

It took nearly a year for the fix to emerge when Tony Palladino, an Essex team-mate, reported Westfield who had shown him the money. Westfield and Kaneria were arrested in May 2010. In September Westfield, who had been released by Essex a few weeks before, was charged. Kaneria was not.

In January 2012 Westfield watched from the dock as his mother and aunt wept in the public gallery of the Old Bailey after he had pleaded guilty to accepting or obtaining a corrupt payment to bowl in a way that would allow the scoring of runs contrary to the Corruption Act 1906. His father was absent because he was to undergo an operation for prostate cancer.

A prison sentence came as a surprise to Westfield. He is reluctant to “slag off” his legal team, which was provided by the PCA, but he says that at no stage did they mention he might be “sent down”. “They didn’t even think about it, nothing like that.” And certainly nowhere as notorious as Belmarsh, the prison which housed the most dangerous criminals in the UK.

“I was afraid. I got locked up in the most secure jail in Europe and I didn’t even know this until I got there. No one told me. I was sharing a cell with a double murderer. My crime compared to his was nowhere near. ‘What am I doing in here with a double murderer?’ I’m not saying I shouldn’t have gone to jail but just not in the same one as people like that.

“He’s in there for the rest of his life. And if he wanted to kill me he could have done. 100 per cent. He could snap at any point. I was thinking that constantly. It wasn’t easy to sleep at night. That was exhausting. If you pissed him off he was aggressive. I saw a few people piss him off. 

“Some guy got his head whacked in because he wouldn’t give someone some food. I saw a guy got beaten up by 20 or 30 guys. You see it all in there. You see people carrying weapons. You see everything. Everything. It was hell.

“I tried to act normal. I was scared and nervous. You can’t show you are weak, though. You’ve got to get the balance. If I was scared and showed it then you could become their bitch or something.”

After two months Westfield was released. If he thought the ordeal was over, he was wrong. In April this year the ECB wanted him to appear as witness in the appeal by Kaneria against his life ban. The way they went about it was reminiscent of the pressure applied by his former team-mate.

“They wouldn’t leave me alone,” he says. “I wanted to forget it all. They got a court summons in the end. The ECB said if I didn’t give evidence then I’d go back to prison. I was getting the ECB legal guys and the anti-corruption guys coming to the house all the time trying to hand me the summons. Twelve at night, in the morning. Banging on the door, knocking on the window.  My dad had just had another operation. One time when my little brother went out they ran after him, thinking it was me.”

Westfield says he was abandoned. He felt let down by the PCA and ECB who he believed had a duty of care for him. He released a statement which criticised them for a lack of support. To outsiders it sounded like a rant from a bitter young man. But sat opposite him, on the inside somewhat, it was clear what Westfield was. Broken.

For months after he left Belmarsh Westfield admits that he barely spoke. He had retreated, frightened to speak or act. His parents had to attend every legal meeting to make sure he talked. Although he failed the system, the system failed him. 

“I wanted support,” he says. “Just someone to be there for me. Rats [Jason Ratcliffe, the assistant chief executive at the PCA] was quite good with me. He was texting me so I can’t knock him but ... I don’t know ... just to show me they’re there and supporting me. I didn’t have that.”

It would be too easy to reckon that Westfield has no cause for complaint. ‘He shouldn’t have done it then’ is the simplistic argument of fools. He was a guinea pig. The first of his kind to investigated, tried and sentenced. But just as Westfield can educate other players, he can teach the PCA, ECB and county teams how to deal with a corruption case. 

For example, he does not exclude the PCA, ECB and Essex  from blame when he talks of the “authorities who were fully aware” of the position he found himself in at Essex with Kaneria. It is an incendiary claim.

“I won’t point fingers but I know that someone knew. I am a little angry about that. I did what I did and I’m guilty, don’t get me wrong. But people knew. Danish should not have been playing. If I was being shown pictures of bookmakers or whoever, asking me to identify them, then they knew all about what he was up to. Certain people acted as if they didn’t know, they didn’t say anything because of who Danish was.”

What Westfield won’t talk about is if he was unique in the English game. The solitary fixer. “It goes on, yeah, yeah. But I’m not saying anything.” An embarrassed smile suggests he might not be the only one. Again he brings it back to the topic he is most comfortable.

“What I did was wrong. I paid the price. A heavy price and I’m not complaining. I’ll only ever be known as the first person to be convicted for this. That’s what I am to people. Their first thought when they see me. I let down my friends, my family, my-team-mates. Everyone. I let down everyone. I will live with that for the rest of my life.”

This article was first published in  The Cricketer magazine's January edition