 Salaam from the People's Dispatch Studios in New Delhi. I'm Siddhant Ani and we're talking today about the very unfortunate news coming in of the death of veteran investigative journalist Andrew Jennings at the age of 78 after the brief and sudden illness. His death is a loss to all of us who have been engaged in journalism, particularly those of us who've been engaged in sports journalism and covering politics in sport or the politics of sport and corruption in sport. He was in many ways a path breaker of the field. I read now a short bit from an obituary written by a close collaborator and colleague of Jennings, Jens Anderson, who runs the organization PlayTheGame.org. He writes, and I quote, a journalistic pioneer whose work was crucial for uncovering the culture of corruption in world sport for almost 25 years. Andrew Jennings set new and higher standards for journalistic coverage of sports politics. Joining me on this show today are news click sports editor, Leslie Xavier and senior sports journalist with the Times of India, one of the largest English language dailies in the world, Siddharth Saxena. Good to have you both on the show from various places. Hope you're safe and all right. Very unfortunate circumstances bringing us together this evening. Guys, Siddhartha, I'd like to come to you first. You have collaborated with him on some projects for the Times of India way back in 2007, you were saying. Give us a sense of the kind of work, the scale of work and the impact of work of Andrew Jennings' work. Andrew Jennings was a lone wolf, if you look at it in one sense, right? He was a pain in the back straight for a lot of these high and mighty sports officials and administrators all across the world. He riled him no end. And I guess that's the real essence or reason for being a journalist. Like I was saying earlier that when you joined journalism in the early 90s, they asked you what you read. The seniors would ask you. And since you were kind of two starry eyed when you joined because a couple of they would call on the landline and those kind of things. And they would say, we read. And if you said, like I said, beyond the boundary, they would, okay, they would not. If you said fewer pitch, they said, okay, this guy is probably reading, he likes to read and he likes to understand the human side of sports fandom. And they would ask you, then they would ask you that have you read Lord the Rings? This is before the movie or the franchise was given a defibrillator. And you'd probably say no most of the time, Lord the Rings was not the kind of stuff you would read as a sports fan, but it was essential reading in a sense. And then they would say, okay, go to the British library, pick it up and find it. And that's why you realize that Andrew Jennings, like I said, was a lone wolf. He investigated stuff because he wanted the truth to be out. And he realized that there was a huge culture of very convenient give and take in the highest corridors of sporting power where people rule it like they feed them. And he took it upon himself to unearth all of that. And in doing so, he may have made a lot of enemies in the higher places, but he kind of gained a cult following amongst independent journalists who saw sport, who wanted to see sport, not just within the parameters of the boundary line or the ring, but beyond that, what made it run? Who ran it? How did it have so much money? It can always be so straight and simple when sport becomes a globalized commodity. So in that sense, he realized that there's nothing to be found. So yes, Andrew Jennings is going, is a big loss, especially in a time when journalism, sports journalism, investigative sports journalism has taken a beating in a sense, because all the big powers are kind of collaborating themselves to keep the truth under wraps. Yeah, very much in that sense, like any other major global industry and particularly in this case, I suppose, very similar to the entertainment industry, as it were. Siddharth, you also were saying that you had the opportunity to actually interact with Jennings, to engage with him, to see him speak, perhaps, and he had this very engaging way of communicating to back up, like you said, all the numbers and the facts and the hard data that was there in his work. Give us a sense of his persona and how he communicated and put his message or his story across. You mentioned PlayTheGame.org, which I think is one of the last bastions of where you were trying, striving to protect journalistic integrity and trying to dig out truth. This is a workshop, as I was told when I was in the Sun Times in 2000. There's a workshop for sports in Denmark. What do you want to go and attend? I said, obviously, yeah, freezing winter, but still. And that's where you landed and Anderson was there, Jennings was there, and he was the brains behind it. And it was like people from all across the world, like-minded people, all ethnically different, but with a similar bent of mind to disturb the status quo as it were, to understand what was actually wrong in sports, because definitely there were things wrong in sports, there was doping, there was corruption, there was bribery, there was, I mean, you know. So, this was a three-day symposium, which is a very successful thing now. And I think it was in the second or third edition when we went in 2000. And for someone as new as me, first trip abroad, looking up, finding all these names you had read about, and there they were, mingling with you, having a drink with you, sharing a coffee. And when it came to business, talking business, Andrew Jennings literally owned the house. He was a flamboyant guy who was storytelling in no way. But pulling no punch, I mean, he just went all out. And then at that time, his favorite punching bag was Yonant Antonio Samaran, she was the IOC president, who he had no bones in highlighting repeatedly that he was aligned with General Franco during the Spanish Civil War, yeah, those days. And that's how he got the plumb post of the IOC and the Barcelona Olympics, stuff like that. And how he unearthed the whole thing. It was his baby, the way he told it, and we were floored. I remember the next morning, I caught him at breakfast, the second session had started, and he didn't seem to put up that he was missing out on the other top speakers, because he was sitting with this guy from India, and I wanted to know, he had a very interesting insight, or the extent of insight that he had was interesting about how the Indian system worked, because they kind of fed off what the people in Switzerland gave out in that sense. So once the Olympic Lord of the Rings saga, in a sense, was over when he had two other books following that, he turned his attention to FIFA. And that's what it got really entertaining and really everybody in the world sat up and took notice. Blatter tried to get the book banned across the world. Obviously it wouldn't succeed. We all probably ordered advance copies of it. And when Blatter came to India on this, like I said, a PR heavy trip in 2007, I thought it would be interesting to just kind of lay out with Andrew's collaboration, of course, and with his help, of course, the real picture of what Blatter's INC, if one can call that, which is FIFA, is all about, given the constraints of finite space in the newspaper, maybe what, 700 words at the end most. So Blatter came, it was a huge thing. I think the biggest thing in Indian football in recent times is not Maradona's coming or Messi is coming to India. It's the same Blatter's coming to India. I mean, we pulled out all the stops. And sorry, I remember this former Indian captain who didn't show up for Maradona's visit a year later, but he was there for Blatter's thing. And he said, yeah, so why didn't you go for Maradona? Which is a more organic idea to do. It's the most spontaneous idea. The greatest footballer is coming. He said, no, but that guy was the FIFA president, right? So India needs him, right? He said, okay, fine. So this is how the thing should go, right? So I decided to do an interview apart from a couple of other stories. I just did an interview with Andrew on the book. The book is foul, you know, on FIFA, it's called foul. And in typical Andrew Plainspeak, a very smart editor on the desk, gave the headline, Blatter has no interest in India. And here was Blatter, you know, almost riding the proverbial elephant here in India. Remember, he came to Calcutta and the first thing he says is I'm a salesman of football. I'm a grand old salesman of football. I mean, so I said, okay, fine, let's see what it really entails. And then the day he landed it two days later, here was his interview in the Times of India. I think it was published all edition. There was this press conference scheduled for the last leg of his tour, which is in Delhi, which is in Delhi, in the All India Football Federation headquarters. The president and the secretary all were there. Four Blatter's men. And I wasn't, finally I wasn't able to attend that press conference, though I really so badly wanted to. But someone tells me, people tell me that here, that he waived the copy of the Times of India and say, I'm gonna sue this guy. I'm gonna sue this guy. This is pure vendetta and stuff like that. So those were those little cheap thrills I got working with Andrew. But when I told Andrew, he said, but he didn't say anything. There were so many questions for him. So he hasn't given out anything. So in that sense, we've done this episode, we haven't really gotten forward with trying to nail Black. Yeah. Yeah. Later, all those, most of those allegations have proven true. There's a different, there's a genuine guard at FIFA. Now who rules FIFA, who controls FIFA? That's for another Andrew Jennings, probably. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think of late, very recently, I think fraud charges have finally been leveled and things like that. So yeah, perhaps in that sense, what happens next and where the scenario is currently at with not just FIFA, but also the IOC will require another Andrew Jennings, which is a good sort of time to bring Leslie in. Leslie, you're leading a small team at an independent news website, NewsClick. How challenging is it to pursue investigative stories? Or let's not even go there. Just at the very basic level, with access as tightly controlled as it is today, to sport, particularly elite level sport. How difficult is it to continue to do your basic work as a sports journalist, as a reporter, while also trying to, like Siddharth was saying, Andrew Jennings did through his life speak power to truth? Jennings in that sense probably set a, I mean, the ground rules of engagement, so to speak, if free journalists have to take on the powers, how they have to collaborate across the world and connect with each other and guard each other even, and then also collaborate, exchanging ideas, information leads. And then what has happened is now that another set of blackers and all these officials have taken over control. It's very clear. The same thing happens in India. It happens across the world in almost all the countries where big sport is run and sport is run as a business. So when we look at specifically at NewsClick and with the team that we have, all like-minded journalists would like to be critical of things that happen around, try and bring out news that nobody else touches, because it has clearly from the, from the 2000s, the sports journalism, the world of sports journalism has clearly shifted from sport and into a highly PR driven enterprise. What Siddharth was saying, what he mentioned, blackers visit to India was a PR driven exercise that was pretty new for India to see, because till then we also add some level of sanctity as far as sport and organizational sport events and all these things are concerned. We looked at sport a little differently. Now that visit and now fast forward to 2022, that was in 2007. And football has drastically changed the way where it's run in the country. We understand, we at NewsClick try to cover Indian football with that in mind, where the evolution of Indian football has taken a direction which is not exactly healthy for the sport in the country. And that is a voice that is not brought out in any of the publications that cover football in the country. Nobody does that. The sort of introduction that you gave to Blackers that 2007 visit where he was saying, I am the salesman of this sport, it pretty much sums it up because over the next five or 10 years, what has essentially happened is that in many ways, bits and pieces of Indian football have been chopped up and sold. Without any of us even realizing that there was a market in this or something that we wanted to buy. More than buy sold. More than buy sold, yeah sold. Absolutely sold. I don't know who's buying it, but it's definitely being sold. Yeah, definitely. I think Jennings would have had a lot, I don't know how much attention he might have paid to it, but he would definitely have had a lot to say about how things are progressing in this country with the league structure and how club competitions are held and how that feeds into, like you were saying, much bigger, sort of, yeah. But what Leslie said is true. The access right now is so much more difficult. At some level just, it's not rocket science, at some level it just might be so simple and so we see that it could surprise you, but if you see the layers of access that are required to be broken, that is still so exhausting at some level. So probably in Jennings's time, it was rather more amateurish to be broken down, in a sense, if you know what I'm trying to say. It was simpler, probably. The people in power didn't realize that they would be up for scrutiny. In a very street-wide, street-smart, street-wide ways, which Jennings did very well. He would provoke, he would go needle, but he would have documents, he would always have the facts with him. Like I said, his basic tenets were networking, not like what we do in India, or cocktails, no, and research. By networking, he meant find out the other agreed party, find out the next simple meaning journalist, find out what he knows, find out the person who has a grudge within the organization, see cultivating, see what he knows. So that was his modus operandi, that's how he kind of built his vast, list of contacts and sources and, you know, and yes, documents, research. Get the documents, get it. Not many people, see, it's very sad that no big newspaper or website or channel has carried his passing. I was checking, it is probably one of the least trending name terms, hashtags, as you say, over the past, though it could have been so much bigger, given the extent of social media. There's only one so far, you know, almost underground cult working to remember him, like probably we are doing now, which we just show that how much hand in glove the establishment is, you know, at the top heights of power. Absolutely. How much of a problem he was, you know, because they filled him so much. Yeah, and this is a confluence of big tech, big media and of course, you know, the entertainment industry. So yeah, completely wide-ranging sort of scenario. We're almost out of time again. Sorry, Leslie, we haven't been able to get you in too much, but I will ask you before we leave you both and maybe, Leslie, you can go first. If you can recommend for those of us who might be unfamiliar with Jennings' work, a book or any part of his work that impacted you personally the most? No, for me, for any aspiring journalist, and I happen to sometimes interact with young journalists, student journalists also in webinars and all these things. So in fact, two days back, the day Jennings died, I was in a webinar at a university. And without knowing, I mean, that Jennings is no more, I was talking some of Jennings' ideas, thoughts about how to cover sport, what to bring out, what to look out for. It's not just about results or medals or things like that. So in general, it's not just about his books, but the quality of work, the ideals of work that he put in place to ensure that, like Siddharth mentioned earlier, truth comes out and the after-all journalists are seekers of truth that way, to bring it out into the public domain. And he said that Jennings is also the reason how sports administrators and sport business and the stakeholders in sport have evolved and closed their ranks. It's, I mean, Jennings' entry into FIFA investigations and the long list of, it started off with him riling him up at a press conference asking him, have you ever taken in private? Two weeks later, apparently a source from FIFA contacted him and from there it started. It's not easy anymore because what the establishment has done off late is that they have set up their own men. It's everybody has their hand in the cookie jar and nobody is willing to. Nobody is aggrieved in the system, mostly. If you look at the Indian football federation, for instance, elections have not been held for the last two years and it's new. And nobody is, I mean, yeah, maybe some grudges are there here and there, but nobody is willing to stand up because everybody gets their view one way or the other. So they are all happy. So this, that kind of closing off the ranks has happened. And also the various layers that the business of sport has set the PR driven mechanisms where for a journalist, for a young journalist to break into covering big sport, you know, she needs to compromise some things. And the companies that they work for also insist that they need to compromise. So it's a much more complex web to break now. And that challenge, I mean, we need to accept to probably do justice to someone like Jennings who has done so much. And that would be a true legacy. So for me, my recommendation to anyone for that matter, not just sports and for that matter is to understand that it's also to evolve because that's what Jennings was. He evolved as a journalist to his career and he ensured that he is up to speed with what is happening around and catch them. So that's the biggest lesson I carry with myself and probably we all should. All right. Siddharth, if you can, you mentioned of course that the early and sort of defining work, Lord of the Rings, but apart from that, anything else that you, of course, I mean, there's so much, I guess all of his work is something that we should read. So maybe I'll ask you a different question, Siddharth. Do you think taking off from what Leslie was saying, do you think that actually some impact has also been had in terms of a basic level of transparency when it comes to sports governance? We keep hoping it does, but you have the Lodha committee in recommendations which are kind of being overturned with such impunity. You go back to the board and they're not being implemented like they should. So one really begins to think that do you do these things and then what happened? Because like Leslie pointed out that they close ranks very quickly. They devise methods, they devise ways, they go loopholes, how to hang on to bar. I mean, you have these recommendations for corruption in the biggest sport in India, which probably in terms of, I bought an appeal, rivals global football, given the sheer numbers and those people have just not given it in India. Yeah, so India is a hotbed of doping in sport. There will be so much investigation. There have been investigations on match fixing, there have been strings on match fixing, but they all get buried. They just get swept under the carpet. Any attempt to properly find out a way to get out of those things or to connect those measures, they just get clamped over. I mean, my suggestion or advice or feeling would be for a young journalist, he should be too enamored by the glitz or the idea of somebody calling the shots. You should be able to probably question them or try to take a step back always. Always take a step back and understand why something is happening, which is happening with such. You know, mechanized smoothness. Obviously, there's something else. What's oiling it, you know? Fine, you love the game, you watch the game, you can marvel at the ratio. You enjoy the game, you can do all that, yeah. The new age idea that he brings, but also at the same time, look at the other things which are happening, you know? I don't know whether the big newspaper with its commercial interests and the other interests affords that kind of real liberty, but that's one cost, but if you don't draw a balance somewhere. Absolutely. But enjoy the game. It's as we like to say on our other show, Siddharth, that we are all playthings of alien forces, and that's something that I think we should all remember at all times, and also keep the hope, keep the faith, guys, keep at it. Thank you very much, both of you, for your time. And remembering, once again, the pioneering investigative sports journalist, Andrew Jennings, who passed away recently at the age of 78 and all the work he did. Hopefully, you have access to some of that work and get a chance to read some of it, if you haven't already. Also, do check out, like the guys were mentioning, playthegame.org, an organization that is doing its bit to promote democracy, transparency, and generally good governance across sport and around the world. This has been an offering from People's Dispatch for more on these stories and, I mean, more on this and all of the other work we do. You can visit our website, People's Dispatch.org, and our sister website, newsclick.in. Thank you for watching. Goodbye.