Corruption and Conspiracy

The ugly face of corruption in sport has shown itself once again in the world of cricket and it’s been greeted with anger and frustration by all the sports’ supporters, players and officials. During the 4^th and final test between England and Pakistan at Lords the News of the World published a front-page story on Sunday including intimate details of spot betting involving four of the Pakistani players. Immediately there was an arrest made by the metropolitan police believed to be the middleman in the scandal. He was allegedly paid £150,000 to guarantee that no balls would be bowled at specific times during the England innings. The video and audio released by the national newspaper prove almost inconclusively that the allegations made are completely true. The balls that were highlighted and guaranteed by the 35 year old middleman were indeed no balls on the day and were probably the most obvious over-stepping you will ever see in a test match in your lives, especially the deliveries bowled by Mohammad Amir, who released the ball from a healthy foot over the popping crease (pictured) and was noticed at the time by the sky commentators as unusual.

These are indeed only allegations at the moment, but the evidence available for all to see does not bode well for the players in question; Salman Butt, Mohammad Amir, Mohammad Asif & Kamran Akmal. The former has been omitted from the investigations but the other three will have to pluck some information out of thin air to clear their names such is the potency of the proof supplied by the News of the World. Alarmingly, the middle man boasted that he has been involved in this sort of thing before, recently throwing the test match against Australia gaining a profit of $1.3m and there were plans in place to defraud the bookmakers once more during the upcoming one day international series against England. You only have to look at the Pakistani Cricket Board’s track record to make your mind up on whether or not there is a conspiracy, and unfortunately for them, it’s not a good one.

Their history in recent years has been nothing short of embarrassing. In 2006, The Oval test match was forfeited by Pakistan following ball tampering witnessed by on-field umpires Darrel Hair and Billy Doctrove. Then-captain Inzamam Ul-Haq refused to take the field after the tea break which effectively ruled them out of the test match and the game was ended there and then. Earlier in 2005, Shahid Afridi was banned for a test match for pitch tampering when he was caught by cameras pirouetting on the Faislabad wicket and even more bizarrely, he was banned for two twenty20 internationals for ball tampering in a match against Australia where he bit the match ball in order to gain an unfair advantage. In March 2010, Mohammad Yousuf and Younis Khan were banned indefinitely from international cricket for fighting within the squad and causing rifts within the playing and coaching staff and Rana Naved and Shoaib Malik were handed one-year bans and huge financial fines for similar offences. These bans were laughably thrown out of the window as soon as the Pakistan middle order came under scrutiny and Mohammad Yousuf’s ban was lifted and he was recalled to the squad.

The Pakistan Cricket Board is nothing short of a disgrace and their handling of players and staff is a stepping-stone to the situation it finds itself in currently. In recent years, they have single-handedly brought the game of cricket into disrepute with one ridiculous story after the next and frankly, there is only so much the viewing public can take.

Let’s forget that players are innocent until proven guilty, these players are as guilty as a fat girl at an empty buffet table. How they can justify their actions is beyond everyone, none less so than 18 year old Mohammad Amir, who won Pakistan’s player of the series and is a bowler who should have been challenging the great Wasim Akram after becoming the youngest player on the Lord’s honours board and the youngest player to 50 wickets in test cricket. That record is likely to be all he achieves in the game when he is banned (hopefully for life) by the ICC along with his counterparts in the spot-fixing scandal when proven guilty by the police report.

For a nation in turmoil, Pakistan hold one thing dear to their heart and that is cricket, but even the most passionate of supporters surely cannot cheer in the same vein as they once did following the conspiracy. The matter of a no ball on the face of it is an extra run and an extra ball, but if on the said ball the bowler happens to take the wicket of someone, what is that telling the people that have paid in excess of £45 to support someone wearing their nation’s emblem?

For the time being, Pakistan should be banned by the ICC and the MCC from competing at any level and the players wages to be frozen by the PCB. If the appropriate powers that be don’t take action, then it should be up to the individual authorities such as the England and Wales Cricket Board to refuse to play in a series against such a corrupt establishment. It’s hard to see how the Pakistan team can regain the trust of anyone, because of the sheer number of players involved and in the loop of what is happening. They have tarnished the game for far too long now, and it’s time that the game of cricket stood up against the cheats in the sport in order to salvage its integrity, otherwise it’s going to be very difficult to decipher whether the action being watched is real or whether it’s a money-spinning furore by the greedy fraudulent black sheep of the game.