“It always comes back to cricket.” In a country like ours where cricket is a religion, the Netflix documentary Caught Out: Crime. Corruption. Cricket delves into the scandalous and unethical aspects of the sport.
It all started with one phone call to a journalist from a bookie, that led a whole group of sports journalists to chase the story of match-fixing. Manoj Prabhakar, the first Indian cricket player to talk about it in an interview in 1997, was either called the most gutsy man or the most foolish one.
This led to an investigation by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), but it was soon shut down due to the disapproval and unhappiness among the public. It was only when it was established that South African cricketer Hansie Cronje was involved in this scandal, that a short story based on match-fixing in Indian cricket was featured by journalist Minty Tejpal on Tehelka.com with the help of Prabhakar.
This left the fans shattered. The involvement of Kapil Dev was proved through the video, and the documentary film captures the outrage after the video containing the proof was released for the world to watch. It went on to show how yet another player Mohammad Azharuddin was allegedly involved in the match-fixing scandal.
What is most striking about this documentary film is the way it combines old footage, interviews of journalists and CBI officials, and reenactments of the series of events that took place then. It can be viewed as a form of journalism with a hint of fiction.
Director Supriya Sobti Gupta, a former journalist, was asked about the journalistic aspect of the film. She said, “It’s very difficult for news networks and organisations and journalists to write about how bad the situation is (in a scandal like this).” She added, “We had some people saying something about match-fixing and how it happens, and the moment the camera was on, it was like, ‘Oh no it never happened, I know nothing about it!’” She emphasised how the fictional elements of the film helped it reach a wider audience by way of a platform like Netflix.
While it is a captivating watch, the film manages to just scratch the surface of the issue rather than digging deeper into the facts. For example, the stories of personalities like MK Gupta and Dawood Ibrahim are not covered too deeply, making the film seem incomplete, and leaving the audience yearning for more.
The reason behind this is that no matter how much research one does, the archives and history of such cases are rarely accessible to the filmmakers, which is why the director has focused more on the storytelling part of the film. She explained, “The storytelling style when I worked with a lot of the editors is that they know the way you have got to weave the story, and I've not seen this with the people that I have worked with. And I know from a lot of peers that we would wish for better storytelling on that front because it helps the story.”
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