My original thoughts having been here.
First: The Pakistani tour bosses have been saying that because there has as yet been no decision under British law to prosecute anyone, no wrongdoing has yet been proved. But the legal problem is that there has to be someone who lost a fraudulent bet, and finding such a person may be difficult, even impossible. But just because the British law may do nothing, that doesn’t mean that cricket doesn’t have any problem. Already, the News of the World has proved to almost everyone’s satisfaction (if that suffices as the word) that no balls were bought and paid for, from Asif and Amir, if only to prove that they could be. That Pakistan test match captain Salman Butt and current Pakistan cricket boss Ijaz Butt refuse to acknowledge this only makes them look guilty also.
Second: Kudos to the British tabloid press. Sport often has reason to resent British news hounds. I was reminded recently, when reading this book, that ace Dutch soccer manager Guus Hiddink (who, unlike current England boss Fabio Capello, is fluent in English as well as soccer) turned down the England job that he would otherwise have loved to do, simply because he couldn’t face his love life being done over by these ghastly people. But this time, a British tab picked a target truly worthy of its ruthless attentions. They nailed down and publicised beyond doubt, within a few weeks, what all the cricket anti corruption units and police forces of the cricket-o-sphere couldn’t in over a decade.
Third: “Innocent until proved guilty” only applies to the legal system. If English cricket fans like me now regard Pakistan cricket as guilty until proved innocent, and most of us now surely do, we can impose our own sentence upon it right now, by refusing to pay to attend any more Pakistan cricket games in our country.
Fourth (the order of these points has now become rather random but I will bash on anyway): It surely doesn’t stop at “spot fixing”, i.e. at just a few no balls that don’t affect the result. Match fixing is surely also involved, still. The Sydney test last winter in Australia, when Pakistan mysteriously threw away a dominant position, and the Lord’s test recently concluded where, whatever official England cricket now says, the Pakistanis did the same thing again, both now look bent. Trott and Broad (who shared in a record stand for England), and the England team in general, understandably don’t want to think this and have said in public that they don’t. But they probably do, just as the rest of us do.
Fifth: England cricket is now busy demonstrating, in concrete and steel, the truth of the Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle, being now deep into a major historic costs swamp. Numerous expensive new stands have recently been built, or at least expensively refurbished, but they mostly can’t now be filled at prices that will pay for all the work that’s been done. Meaningful cricket games cannot be conjured out of thin air even at the best of times, which these times are not, and demand even for good contests is limited. Thus, to cancel the few remaining one day games fixed between England and Pakistan would, just now, be a particular disaster for English cricket. These games will be a disaster anyway, because they are now pretty much meaningless except as a way for the English press to carry on hammering away at this fiasco, but not as big a disaster as they would be if they had been cancelled, because this would have meant all the ticket money so far gathered for them having to be handed back. But, the Pakistanis should not confuse the deeply insincere welcome they will now get for their remaining games here with a general willingness on the part of England cricket to forgive them, i.e. arrange more games with them, or for them, in the foreseeable future. (Whoops. I nearly put “fix” more games.) If the Pakistanis want to go on playing international cricket with England, or in England against anybody else (which is their current arrangement on account of Pakistan itself being too terrorist-menaced for anyone else to visit), they will have to clean up their act.
Sixth: This ruckus here in England has caused a general raking over of the recent history of Pakistan cricket and its various rows. I have already mentioned how the recent test series in Australia is, as Michael Jennings said in connection with my earlier posting about this, being, as it were, re-evaluated. The same applies to things like the big row at the Oval four years ago, which ended prematurely amidst loud Pakistani protestations of complete innocence, this time of ball tampering. Even that run in all those years ago, between England captain Mike Gatting and that Pakistani umpire, starts to look a bit different. So, more significantly, do all the much more recent rows within the Pakistan camp. Shahid Afridi, the Pakistan one day captain for the remainder of the tour, who is said to be a particular hold-out against corruption, behaved very strangely when he recently (a) played like a loon in earlier games in this tour, and then (b) abruptly resigned as the test match captain. It looked crazy at the time. I now suspect that the true behind-the-scenes story might present Afridi in a rather better light. [Later: see also, as explained in the comments: Bob Woolmer, death of.]
Seventh: I have read recent internet comments from Pakistan fans saying that Pakistan has the best fast bowlers in the world, and that the only reason they are being accused of cheating is because the rest of the world, England cricket fans like me in particular, can’t deal with this. Rubbish. If anything, these latest accusations embody the claim that actually, the likes of Asif and Amir are even better than they have recently seemed. They had Australia and England on the ropes recently and could have finished them off. They merely chose not too. How skillful is that?!? Which just goes to show how much is at stake here. A potentially world beating cricket nation, on a par with the West Indies in their pomp towards the end of the last century, and Australia since then until about now, has been brought down from hero to zero by all this.
Eighth: Although the attitude of fans elsewhere in the world, most notably in India, Australia and England, will be very important, the decisive factor in all this will probably now be the attitude of Pakistan’s own cricket fans. What they now demand of their cricketers will determine whether Pakistan cricket now embarks upon the painful and difficult climb back towards cricket respectability, or just gets wiped out as a serious cricket force by its inability or refusal to do this. If the “they only say we cheat because we’re better than them” school of thought triumphs in Pakistan – if, that is to say, they all bury their stupid heads in the sand – then it’s goodnight Pakistan cricket.
On the other hand, England cricket officialdom had hoped that the recent England Pakistan games would attract large numbers of Pakistani fans living in England. But these fans have been notable only for their almost total absence. At the time, commentators said it must have been the prices being charged. But what if Pakistani cricket fans in England, who will have been paying far more attention to their team than I have until very recently, had already concluded that their cricket team was bent as the proverbial nine bob note, and had decided that they simply could not bear to watch it throwing games away any more? It makes sense to me.
Ninth (this has become like that joke about two Oxford philosophers overheard in debate, but never mind): What Michael Atherton said (Times so forget about a link), as flagged up here by Natalie Solent on Monday, about the illegality of betting in large parts of Asia, and the consequent extreme nastiness of the people who run it.
I do not underestimate the difficulties involved in cleaning up Pakistan cricket, and I strongly agree with all those who are saying what a particular tragedy it will be if Amir now has his career taken from him, as will, I think, have to happen. Either Amir will now get banned for long enough to really hurt his career, or they will just prove they aren’t serious. But do not for a moment imagine that not cheating, if you are a Pakistan cricketer of talent, is a mere matter of Just Saying No. Threats are involved, not just bribes. If they can’t charm and smarm you into doing their bidding, the gangsters are all too likely to try violence, not just against you but against your family. So, it absolutely won’t be easy. It just has to be done if cricket in Pakistan cricket is to have much chance of surviving as a force in the world.
Either that, or we will all have to wait for Pakistan to stop being a totally failed nation, full of gangsters, and of religious maniacs who don’t have a clue how to stop gangsterism but only make it worse (e.g. by banning all betting) and many of whom are gangsters themselves, and hope that when that has been accomplished (I give it half a century at the absolute minimum), they still remember cricket.
2 points, one minor the other rather important.
1. Minor point. People keep saying that the odd No-Ball does not affect the game, is only the thin end of the wedge etc. Each of those balls could have taken a wicket and the mentality to not try on some balls MUST impact on the player’s psychology throughout the rest of the match.
2. Not heard much about Bob Woolmer with regard to this. Consider the strength of the Pakistan Team, remember that they got kicked out of the World Cup by IRELAND and then suddenly the (too honest?) coach is found dead with one pathologist who examined the body still claiming that he was strangled. The kinds of pressure on these young players may not have been just financial reward or reputational blackmail but harm to them and/or their family. You already allude to the type of people involved in asian betting rings.
The Sydney test last winter in Australia, when Pakistan mysteriously threw away a dominant position, and the Lord’s test recently concluded where, whatever official England cricket now says, the Pakistanis did the same thing again, both now look bent.
It happened in the same way, too. In Sydney, Australia had lost 8 wickets and were in a hopeless position before a large 9th wicket partnership brought them back into the game. Mike Hussey and Peter Siddle (who scored the runs) don’t want to believe it was a fix any more than Trott and Broad do – because they had previously thought it was a great victory.
Woolmer was almost certainly murdered. It might be that the affair was later dropped because the police and officials were scared, or simply because nobody would talk to them because all the potential witnesses were scared. I recall Greg Chappell (the former Australian captain who was then coach of India) just about having a nervous breakdown after Woolmer’s death because he was terrified that someone would try to murder him too.
Woolmer was killed, I am convinced of it. The case should be re-opened.
As for Brian’s broader points, I agree, and it appears that it in some cases, cricketers are threatened with violence if they don’t go along with the fixers. And we cannot be so relaxed that it does not happen in other parts of the world, in other sports, either.
I hope the young, foolish bowler does have a career, but I am afraid that he will have to be punished severely if wrongdoing is proven. And as a cricket fan, I am not paying a penny to watch any match in which any of these guys are involved.
Alas, for the forseeable future, Pakistan is likely to be banished from serious international cricket. It’s a disaster for a country that could use a bit of normality.
There is so much dirt flying around about Pakistan cricket just now that I quite forgot about Woolmer, although I have seen comments mentioning him.
In my partial defence, I did write about that here at the time. I tried including the links in this but it all got spambotted. So just type Woolmer into our search thingy, if you want to see what I said at the time.
And yes, Rob, I also agree about the no balls thing. Although, I think the “thin end of the wedge” argument rather makes your point, rather than deserving criticism, the point being that no ball fixing leads fairly directly to much worse stuff.
Stuff like you then being completely at the mercy of whoever got you to bowl the no balls. Once you’ve done that, they can threaten to reveal it, and thereby make you fix entire matches.
In my partial defence, I did write about that here at the time.
So did I. A lot of what I wrote then is still relevant, I think. There is a danger of being accused of making a racist “imperial overraction” when one dives into this, but one must live with that, I suppose.
Thinking about this more, though, another event that happened earlier this year strikes me as relevant. There was a player draft for the Indian Premier League. There was a ruling that Pakistani players were allowed to participate in the draft, and eleven Pakistani players did so. However, not a single Pakistani player was drafted by any IPL team. At the time this was reported as a slight against Pakistan over terrorist incidents and other India-Pakistan concerns. In retrospect though, it seems clear that the complete corruption of Pakistanis cricket was understood in India, and that the people running the IPL and Indian cricket understood that Pakistani cricket was bad news. There have in the past been Indian players who have been caught up in corruption, although there have not been any prosecutions, but in many cases it seems clear that they have been taken aside and told that their services have not been required.
So, it would seem that a lot has been done behind the scenes in India and the Indians have known what is going on in Pakistan, whereas England have blundered right into it. India’s cricket are less vulnerable because they are paid better to start with, and because something resembling the rule of law does exist in India.
Seriously, the judgment of Lord’s and the ECB looks consistently bad. Somehow they missed getting properly involved in the IPL and ended up doing a deal with Sir Allen Stanford because they needed the money, and they then did this deal with Pakistan (who were unable to play games at home because terrorists attempted to kill the last foreign team that went there, and who India wanted nothing to do with) because they had empty stadiums and needed someone to play in them. Meanwhile, they were unable to do such things as cooperate sufficiently with the IPL so that English sides can participate in the Champions League. They seem to have made the wrong choice every time.
Surely the best thing would be to legalise gambling? I don’t think William Hill or Ladbrokes pay the heavy mob to threaten to break Andrew Strauss’s legs in order to get him to throw his wicket away, do they? If gambling on the sub-continent was legal all this back street fixing would disappear.
One thing that I find difficult to understand is this – if I was a dodgy Pakistani bookmaker, and someone rocks up and wants to bet large sums on what is a fairly long shot (a particular ball being a no ball) I’d smell a rat and refuse the bet. So how exactly does someone make money from such inside information?
Oh my, you blokes do take your cricket seriously. I haven’t seen a screed this long about a stick-swinging sport since a friend made the proposal that the Red Sox needed to move to New Hampshire from Boston, so that the savings in having no state income tax would expand the real value of the team’s payroll that they could afford to compete directly against the Yankees for talent, and thus economically break the Curse of the Bambino.
Mike Lorrey,
I’m not a bloke and I don’t follow cricket, but I see this story as being about more than cricket. This scandal the meeting point of several issues:
– Failed states and what happens when corruption gains roots in a culture
– Prohibition versus regulation versus non-regulation of gambling
– Islamic terrorism (the reason the Pakistani team were here in the UK in the first place)
– a libertarian angle: how can voluntary communities police themselves
– how reputation works; how information about reputation is transmitted and sometimes not transmitted (related to the point above)
– the internet and globalisation of gambling and audiences
– the Anglosphere and those cultures with a foot in and a foot out of it. Which way are they going?
Jim, legalising gambling would certainly help by taking it away from organised criminals. Ironically, of course, gambling is illegal under Shariah, and yet in a muslim nation such as Pakistan, gambling is rife, but run in the underground economy. As we libertarians like to say, if you ban consenting acts between adults, it causes no end of problems.
Mike Lorrey: cricket is one of the world’s greatest and most absorbing games, and there are also a lot of other, “cultural issues” associated with an unfolding news story like this. BTW, there have been max-fixing scams, I recall, in the fairly early days of baseball in the US. These things really piss us Ordinary Joes off.
Natalie
Thanks for replying to Mike Lorrey so eloquently. What a silly comment his was.
Some time, Real Soon Now, I must write that posting about Why Sport Matters (even though the result of any particular game matters very little indeed by comparison).
Points to include, along with those you make: how sport has replaced war between great powers (touch wood), how sport is used to civilise small boys, and how sport – cricket in particular (think of phrases like “not cricket”) – embodies and acts out larger moral ideas. The way that sport teaches boys (particularly boys) to endure public disappointment with dignity, and to maintain civilised relationships with opponents against whom they also compete fiercely, strikes me as especially significant.
Regarding Mike Lorrey’s comment, and Natalie’s and Brian’s responses to it:
1) Does the term “bloke” still carry a sexual connotation? In the US we’ve come to use the term “guy” in a unisex way (as in “you guys are all nuts”), although originally it was strictly a male reference. Is “bloke” still exclusively male?
2) There is nothing “silly” about the Red Sox or the (now-defunct) Curse! Watch your tongue!
Mr Lorrey may have been joking!
Laird, I think of “bloke” as exclusively masculine. It is strange how “guy” changed. I noticed that change as it happened, a year or two later in the UK than the US.
Brian, it is interesting that sport matters, in most of the ways you said, more for males than females. Another thought: during the last 150 years societies that worshipped or denounced sport were bad, societies that quite liked it were good.
Not sure if the above thought is meaningful, or, indeed, true. But it popped into my head, so there it is, O World.
I was in fact being a bit light hearted in my post, though my commentary about the Red Sox and attempts to economically balance the scales with the Yankees prior to the 2004 World Series win were, in fact, factual, and dead serious. That you thought it silly only shows how little you understand or appreciate the historical rivalry between the Yankees (a New York team, btw has no right to use the name “Yankees” since you must be from New England to be a Yankee, by definition, New Yorkers are Knickerbockers) and the Red Sox, dating back to the era of Babe Ruth and his dreaded Curse.
Red Sox fans are, of course, ranked number one by readers of Sports Illustrated as the most dedicated fans in sports, anywhere (whether or not SI’s readership is properly distributed outside the US is an entirely separate matter of debate). So when I, as a Red Sox fan, make a comment about the dedication of a Cricket fan to his or her sport, it is meant in at least the most serious way, as a compliment.
To emphasize my point further vis a vis Red Sox vs Yankees rivalry: Naming a team from New York the “Yankees” is like calling a sparkling wine from the Rhineland “champagne”, or calling a Kentucky moonshine “Scotch”. It’s an offense deserving of declarations of war, eternal enmity, and pissing on the graves of ones enemies.
To trade the finest baseball player in the history of the sport to such a team is akin to the Pope selling the corpse of the virgin Mary to the heathen musselmen to be necrophically defiled.
Mike Lorrey
No, no, I understand completely about how very important the Red Sox thing is. It was just the implication that to care and to write at length about anything in sport is silly, that I thought silly. Especially something with so many beyond-sport vibes, like this Pakistan cricket row.
Delighted to hear you don’t really think this.
This is essentially shaping up to be cricket’s version of the Black Sox Scandal and is going to need the same kind of resolve to redeem the sport from its shadow. It’s a shame as Mohammad Amir is one of the best pacemen I’ve ever seen, but if making him cricket’s “Shoeless” Joe Jackson is what is needed to save the sport, so be it.
Shoeless Joe was framed. There was no real evidence against him.
Laird, Jackson admitted being part of the fix in his Grand Jury testimony. But regardless of that, a line needed to be drawn after the scandal, that baseball needed to be “seen to be clean”, and maybe Jackson was a victim of that. It’s in this respect that I see Amir for cricket – there’s a price to be paid and Amir will have to pay it; so that cricket can be “seen to be clean”.
Baseball and cricket are both sports that appeal to nerdy obsessives, and the very statistical minded. This is possibly one reason why they are both attractive to bookmakers and both vulnerable to corruption.
I’d respectfully submit that there’s another team that commands even greater loyalty-in-the-face-of-non-achievement than the Red Sox. And they too are cursed, by a goat.
(And why has a grand jury not been empaneled to investigate Steve Bartman?)
Writing at exceeding lengths about a sport and one’s experiences with it is sort of like writing about masturbation with the prose of a romance novel. Not that it can’t be done, and done beautifully (novels such as “A River Runs Through It” are a good example), or alternatively, rather humorously as Yogi Berra so often elucidated, but that if it isn’t written about really well, is often rather banal to the point of tenditiousness. It isn’t something for amateurs to play around with, lest the product sound something like dirty letters from a 40 year old virgin to Playboy.