Routine practice: ‘All teams fix matches, not just Pakistan’

Paul Condon says every international team, at some stage, had someone doing some funny stuff.

LONDON: All of cricket’s leading countries were involved in the fixing of major matches, not just Pakistan, the sport’s former chief anti-corruption investigator said Tuesday.

“In the late 1990s, Test and World Cup matches were being routinely fixed,” Paul Condon, the founding head of the International Cricket Council’s anti-corruption unit, said in an interview with the London Evening Standard.

“There were a number of teams involved in fixing, and certainly more than the Indian sub-continent teams were involved. Every international team, at some stage, had someone doing some funny stuff.”

And Condon added the root of the problem lay not in Asia but in English county cricket, where favours were traded between teams across the domestic 40-over Sunday league and first-class Championship competitions.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 16^th, 2011.