Give us this day a whistle-blower

It took nearly 15 years for the labours of Andrew Jennings to bear fruit. He had already exposed corruption within Scotland Yard and the International Olympic Committee by the time he set his sights on FIFA at the start of the century.

He began by attending a press conference in Zurich, dressed in hiking gear and sticking out like a sore thumb among FIFA's suited employees and an equally suited-up press corps. Jennings was not a football journalist and the only way, he figured, he could let people know that he was about to begin a serious investigation into the organisation was by asking the kind of bluntly provocative question other, more insider-y journalists might not ask.

Sepp Blatter, president then, as he remarkably still is now (though finally he seems to be on his way out), had just finished his little speech. Jennings grabbed a mic: "Herr Blatter, have you ever taken a bribe?"

Blatter of course said no, but that wasn't the point. Jennings had let FIFA employees know what his agenda was. Six weeks later, in Zurich again, a senior FIFA official met with Jennings and provided him with a series of documents. ("I'm a document hound," Jennings said this year in an interview. "If I've got your documents, I know all about you.") Those documents were the first steps on the very long road that eventually led to the arrests of FIFA officials in May this year on charges of corruption. Along the way Jennings produced two books on the subject as well as a BBC documentary.

How cricket could do with the investigative zeal of Jennings and, as crucially, how it could do with a whistle-blower. The ICC, you could argue, is not in the same mess as FIFA. They are two very different bodies, one a members' club, the other a governing organisation. Both, however, are running their games badly and are very secretive about it.

Every sport prides itself on how much a part of a fan's life it becomes. Cricket is no different, and like other sports, it too imagines that somehow it is a greater part of its fans' lives than any other

As Gideon Haigh reminds us in our cover story this month, the Big Three's power grab last year was in line with long-standing ICC tradition, both in that the resultant governance structure is clearly bad for the game and that very little is known about it. The new order is based on meritocracy, the Big Three tell us, but they clam up when asked for details of how that meritocracy is calculated. "The cabinet papers of governments are more freely available than the minutes of the ICC," Haigh writes.

The story is prompted by a recent documentary on cricket administration, Death of a Gentleman, to which Haigh says this is a companion piece. The film's finest moments are those that showcase the blithe disregard with which cricket's most powerful men swat away attempts at probing. Giles Clarke tells the film-makers nobody is interested in cricket administration and "nor should they be".

Clarke is later asked about Allen Stanford, the businessman now in jail for the rest of his life for fraud, and he doesn't so much deflect as kill the inquiry: "No, no, no, no... Next question." N Srinivasan, the ICC chairman no less, and tainted indelibly by the IPL corruption scandal, is asked a question about Lalit Modi. "I don't want to give the importance to Lalit Modi and talk about him."

These are individual instances in an unmissable larger pattern of cricket administration's nonspeak (and try not to laugh at the ICC's response to Haigh's query about their strategic plan).

Maybe our only hope is in Jennings' words: "You know that everywhere, any organisation, if there is any sign at all of how corrupt the people at the top are, there's decent people down in the middle management, because they've got mortgages, they've got children to put through school.

"They are just employees, and they will have a sense of proper morality. So you've got to get them to slip you the stuff out the back door. It used to be from the filing cabinet; now it's from the server."

Let's not get too glum, not yet anyway. This matters because cricket matters to all of us. Every sport prides itself on how much a part of a fan's life it becomes. Cricket is no different, and like other sports, it too imagines that somehow it is a greater part of its fans' lives than any other. Few writers articulate this better than Jon Hotten, who in a vivid and loving essay, writes of a cricket life, from the "white heat of an early obsession" of the game, right to it becoming a "solace and consolation". If you read the cover story first, I would strongly recommend you read this immediately after, to lighten the heart.

Osman Samiuddin is a sportswriter at the National and the author of The Unquiet Ones: A History of Pakistan Cricket

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.