You thought FIFA was corrupt? Take a look at the body governing world cricket. That’s what Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber conclude in this entertaining, at times ramshackle and altogether depressing documentary about the state of the game today.

Setting out its stall as a kind of sporting BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, Sam and Jarrod start their journey into the game’s heart of darkness with an optimistic look at the then-promising career of Jarrod’s friend Ed Cowan, an Australian batsman making his way into the Test side. Promoted alongside him but coming from the more raucous, one-day side of the game is fellow opening batsman David Warner, about to become notorious for punching England’s blue-eyed boy Joe Root in a Birmingham nightclub before the England/Australia ‘Ashes’ series in 2013. The contrasting futures of both batsmen is to provide confirmation of Collins and Kimber’s worst fears.

While putting together WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS, Alex Gibney was to change tack in the course of the film, his attitude towards the formerly heroic Julian Assange shifting dramatically as more facts came to light: here the story is much the same, as Collins and Kimber’s innocent investigation of test cricket and its international decline opens up the more they dig away to reveal a whole burial chamber, glittering and opulent and enormously sinister.

For Tutankhamun’s Tomb read the Indian Premier League, or IPL. Using the ‘Twenty20’ – twenty overs each side – quick-cricket format invented in England in 2003, the IPL which was created five years later now attracts enormous hundred-thousand crowds, in contrast to, say, the hundred or so attending the average English county game. Though as one of the film’s many appalled interviewees on the sidelines astutely points out, ‘the IPL isn’t competing with other forms of cricket but with Bollywood’. It’s also become the focus of a huge gambling market in India and beyond, billions being bet on each match. Needless to say this phenomenon has attracted the big hitters, both in world cricket and Indian business, and DEATH OF A GENTLEMAN attempts to get to the bottom of the byzantine politics involved in running this form of the game, using chalk and a blackboard.

‘the IPL isn’t competing with other forms of cricket but with Bollywood’

Enter Giles Clarke, the film’s pantomime villain (regularly booed at Picturehouse screenings of the film during the summer). Clarke was Chairman – and is now President – of the English and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) which runs the game in this country. Clarke starts out by being bewildered that anybody should want to interview a cricket administrator, turns hostile when he realizes these annoying mosquitoes buzzing around him aren’t going away, then becomes contemptuous if not abusive when pursued by Collins and Kimber to Dubai, now the headquarters of cricket’s governing body the International Cricket Council (ICC) – which is where comparisons with FIFA Behind Closed Doors become apparent.

Clarke’s cause isn’t helped by embarrassing footage of himself and other gullible cricket legends welcoming the American tycoon Allen Stanford to Lord’s, arriving by helicopter with a box containing a million dollars as prize-money for a one-day vanity match (as with the interviews, Collins and Kimber have assembled excellent archive footage to illustrate their adventure). Stanford is now serving a long jail sentence as a result of his ‘ponzi’ schemes, but not before helping wreck the finances of cricket in the West Indies.

Helping them and other strapped-for-cash cricketing nations by spreading round the one-day loot was one of the recommendations in a report commissioned by the ICC from Lord Justice Woolf, who also advised putting an end to the game’s administrators treating it like an exclusive club, of benefit mainly to themselves. Instead the ICC ignored the report and even as DEATH OF A GENTLEMAN was being made stitched up the game even further by handing extra power and financial control to the three fat cats, India, Australia and England. Which is how things now stand with even cricket’s World Cup belying its name by seeing its 14 participating nations reduced to 10.

The film is topped and tailed with the poignant fate suffered by the talented Ed Cowan, symbol of the test-playing ‘gentleman’, discarded by Australia and now batting for fun against Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber in the nets. When all’s said and done they’re fans, not dissimilar to the Barmy Army (except Collins and Kimber single-mindedly follow the game’s administrators round the world rather than their team). And like all fans they’re the last to be considered, let alone kept informed about what’s going on.

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