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
