There is little doubt that drug testing has to be mandatory in cricket. Every good system must create an atmosphere for the clean to thrive and the weeds to be uprooted. And there are both in our sport as there will be even among priests and kindergarten teachers. Sometimes you don’t just have to be clean, you have to be demonstrably clean and that is a small price to pay in the effort to cleanse a sport. Assuming this meets with universal approval, you have to accept that testing, like checking out a cricket ball for tampering, has to be random and irregular. If the thief knows when the policemen are coming, he is unlikely to be pursuing his profession at that time!

Whispers about intake of unusual substances have been going around in the cricket world for a while now. In a naive world you would put that down to mischief mongering but while some whispers have remained whispers, others have been proved right. There was ball tampering, there are bookies and matches, as we now know, have been subjected to differing degrees of influence. True, cricket probably doesn’t need the extreme physical effort that track and field athletes and cyclists do (in the rogues gallery those are the prime portraits) but as we move increasingly to a shorter form of the game, requiring concentrated but small bursts of performance, the need to be more vigilant is greater.

There is one point though in favour of what the cricketers have been saying. Given that cricket, unlike athletics or cycling, is not a seasonal sport there is little time to retreat to an inaccessible place and pump yourself up. There is actually too little off-season training. Maybe one way out is to insist on random drug tests in bilateral tournaments as well, not merely those conducted by the ICC. And while we begin that process immediately we work out what is the best way to include randomness in testing. And if thereafter, the method suggested by WADA emerges the best, so be it. There are many simple hardworking people who would happily agree to being subjected to a few random tests a year in return for so much.

... contd.