A fresh take on cricket’s explosive match fixing scandal

Supriya Sobti Gupta, director of 'Caught Out', talks about her docu-film on an episode that shocked the cricketing fraternity in 2000

Caught Out is a 77 minute sports documentary that looks at India's biggest match-fixing scandal, the icons who got trapped in it and the journalists who uncovered the crime.

The match-fixing scandal in 2000 shocked cricket fans across the world. Its reputation of being a gentleman’s game was dented when popular players like South African captain Hansie Cronje and Indian skipper Mohammad Azharuddin were banned from the sport.

‘Caught Out’, a documentary-film streaming on Netflix, revisits the fixing saga and tells the tale of people who broke the story to the world.

Supriya Sobti Gupta, director of ‘Caught Out’, tells Showtime about the project. Excerpts:

The scandal has been extensively documented. What made you want to retell the saga?

‘Caught Out’ is a retrospective film about the scandal that kicked off in the 90s and blew up in 2000. If you look at any Indian household today, there will be at least one cricket fan who lived through that time. It was a time when cricketers were considered gods. Today, I think things are different as we have other role models to look up to. So, we know what happened but I wanted to show the finer details of it.

What were the finer details that you wanted to present?

There were murmurs of match fixing but there was nothing to pinpoint. There was no evidence of it. The scandal told us the dark truth that we didn’t want to believe. There were people who did the dirty job of bringing this scandal to light. There were people who conducted the investigation, be it the Tehelka journalists (Aniruddha Bahal and Minty Tejpal), the Delhi police officer (KK Paul) who stuck his neck out to call out a foreign captain, and the CBI officer (Neeraj Kumar) who exposed the fact about top players being involved in fixing. I wanted to tell their stories.

The story is from the point of view of people who broke the story rather than the cricketing community...

The key protagonists were the Tehelka journalists and the CBI investigators. They are the ones who broke the scandal. Everybody else in a way gives you the context of the time when the scandal took place. For instance, journalist Sharda Ugra represents the psyche of the Indian public back then. She was a rookie reporter, somebody from the system, who was wary of knowing the dark side of things because these guys were playing for India and that was a big deal.

Why didn’t you want to direct a web series on this vast subject instead?

We wanted to stick with the story of what happened then without going into too many theories. Because this is cricket, there are a lot of checks and balances in place and if you go wrong, there would be brickbats. We had to be very careful. We wanted to stay as close to the truth as possible.

How difficult was it to get footage of a bygone era?

It was a time when things were not documented as well as they are now. We live in the era of breaking news and everyone who has something to show on their phone is a citizen journalist. I think it took us over a year to dig out the visuals. Our archive producers did a great job to get us visuals and photos that took us back in time.

There were match-fixing allegations against the likes of Ajay Jadeja and Nayan Mongia but the documentary only highlights the case involving Azharuddin. Why is that?

The findings of the CBI about these players were largely miniscule when compared with the other players mentioned in the documentary. In the case of Jadeja, he was a popular guy who was the vice captain. We reached out to him. There was a complete conspiracy of silence from players and there was no response from them. We stuck to whatever our experts in the film could find evidence for.

How has the cricketing fraternity reacted to the film?

There has been no response. I wish there was some chatter around it. Only when we talk can we find solutions to potential problems. We know that illegal betting still takes place — there were reports of fixing in the IPL. There was even a story about Brendan Taylor receiving money from a businessman to fix a match. You have to confront such cases if you want to see change in the system.