New Zealand cricket fans, wincing and groaning through a middle-order batting collapse in Hamilton on Thursday, might have been tempted to wonder whether it was being staged for the benefit of Indian bookmakers.
Alas, the self-immolation (five wickets fell for no runs in the space of 19 balls), though extreme even by the Black Caps' standards, had a glumly familiar ring to it. This is a side to which underperforming comes naturally and requires no conspiracy.
Yet sadly not all bad performances on the cricket field can be attributed to ineptitude. Reports of match-fixing are now almost as common as those of freakish spells of bowling or innings of magisterial command.
Cheating by deliberate underperformance is not new: it's a safe bet that the odd Roman coin changed hands before the ludi at the ancient Circus Maximus; members of the Chicago White Sox were famously suborned to throw the World Series in 1919; and professional boxing has often been darkened by the stain of flighters "taking a dive" - and worse.
But in the 21st century, a lot of the big money has been sloshing around in all three forms of cricket. Match-fixing is now big business, driven largely by the gambling culture on the sub-continent where it is easy to get odds on two flies crawling up a wall. What used to be known as "the gentleman's game", in which displays of good sportsmanship and honourable behaviour were deeply embedded in the ethos, has now been deeply tarnished.
