What should every Indian know but probably doesn’t?

Do you still remember this guy?

Yeah, the same guy who sold his cricket life for millions by fixing an over of an important match. But most of us still don’t know the real story behind his betrayal.

The story of the Indian fast bowler- S. Sreesanth

It was a celebration night after defeating CSK in a league match. Sreesanth was on the way to his hotel at around 3 AM in a night, when he saw two Innova cars coming towards him. They stopped him, got him out of the car, thrashed him inside one of the Innova.

Sreesanth thought that it was all a prank played by some fellow players, but he soon realized that it’s a big trap he has got into. The policemen abused him when he asked about whether they have any arrest warrant or some evident proof to arrest him. They took him to the Mumbai Airport, made him wait for 4 hours at the airport and took him to Delhi.

They interrogated him for 9 days. Sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes when he went to the washroom. They just wanted him to accept the crime he did (which he never did). They continuously showed him footage in which Sreeshanth was using the towel as a sign to the fixers. Shockingly, that was all the proof they had. The joint commissioner of Delhi Police (at that time) forced Sreeshanth to accept his crime, and also told him the list of 6 players who also did the fixing thing and about how he is going to drag them to the same place he is in.

Sreesanth very well knew that he is clean. He never did anything wrong. As a second proof, the officials showed a picture of Sreesanth with a so-called ‘bookie’, to which Sreesanth told them that he is his one of the best friends and apparently a state level cricketer with whom he spent months in a room together.

BCCI gave him a lifetime ban. Poor Sreesanth fought the case in Supreme Court, won in 2015. He got a clean chit and he is freed from all the allegations. But the BCCI till date has not lifted the ban, as they very well know that Sreesanth still knows the names of the players told by the officials at interrogation. Sreesanth sent the infinite number of e-mails to BCCI requesting to uplift the lifetime ban on him. But they never replied back.

He went to a charity cricket match in Bahrain with Irrfan Pathan and RP Singh. Before the match,

the organizers refused him to play the match as BCCI have ordered them to do so. He was a spectator in the match, but somewhere in the middle, the organizers asked him to leave the ground as any picture of Sreeshanth in the whole match could be harmful to them.

Sreeshanth is still fighting for justice against BCCI. He has even said that every member in BCCI is corrupted, and they are never going to uplift the ban as he knew the names of those accused cricketers. Sreeshanth is even refused to play at the district level. At this moment, Sreeshanth is the only person fighting against the BCCI after losing five elite years of his career as a fast bowler.

I am pretty sure that BCCI will uplift the lifetime ban as soon as he crosses the age mark of 40. This is how their whole thing operates. According to Sreeshanth, 4 out of those 6 players are still playing at the international level from India and the rest two international players are in IPL.

Sreesanth is just a poor guy caught up in the dirty politics of BCCI but there is a hope that justice would be served one day. Most of us Indians still recall him as a ‘fixer’ for the crime he never did.