MCC tried banning mobile phones from the dressing room to stamp out corruption in cricket, warning of the dangers of strangers interested in titbits about the weather. It tried a comprehensive programme of education and prevention, again to no avail. But the former professionals who sit on the world cricket committee of the Marylebone Cricket Club, the custodian of the laws of the game, have now come up with a novel way to allow players suspected of being involved in fixing to "prove" their innocence by subjecting them to a lie-detector test.
The distinguished members of the panel, who include Steve Waugh, Geoffrey Boycott, Mike Atherton, Mike Brearley and Andy Flower, are proposing that a polygraph might enable Salman Butt, for example, to show that some of the banknotes found in his room really did come from the proceeds of a Tooting ice cream parlour's sales of tutti frutti and banana nut fudge, as the suspended Pakistan captain claims, and not from the News of the World's fake sheikh.
Waugh, the former Australia captain, took responsibility for the proposal today following their latest meeting. "The lie detector test [idea] came from me," he said. "I was thinking that personally if you have done nothing wrong, why wouldn't you have a lie detector test to show you have done nothing wrong."
Waugh's proposal, if taken up by Butt, Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif – the Pakistan players at the centre of last summer's spot-fixing scandal – could reinforce their claims of innocence before their official ICC hearing following an International Cricket Council investigation in Doha next month.
The idea will be given further consideration at another meeting next February before MCC makes firm proposals to the ICC. Other, more orthodox, suggestions include legalising betting in India, the appointment of integrity officers, anti-corruption clauses in contracts and the non-selection of tainted players.
The England captain, Andrew Strauss, was coy about Waugh's proposal. "I don't know about the accuracy of lie-detector tests," he said, highlighting the most obvious problem of relying on the evidence of a polygraph. "If we have to take extreme measures in order to be 100% confident the game is being played in the right spirit, then I'd certainly be happy to do that. The devil of all these things is in the detail."It does sound rather extreme. The novelist Graham Greene had a more palatable suggestion. "Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector," he said.
Perhaps MCC could suggest that next.