Pointing the other way

The reason why Pakistan cricket finds itself thrown again and again into the depth of scandal is simple. We refuse – stubbornly and it has to be said, stupidly – to face up to facts. The revelations that the team management had allowed the players to mingle with the Majid brothers and to use them as their ‘agents’ implies either a great deal of naivety or else a willingness to accept match-fixing and spot-fixing as part of the game. What else can explain the decision to ignore all the warnings issued, and why, after all, did the management not pick up on matters before the press?

Worse still perhaps is the pretence that nothing is wrong even now. We have the PCB’s legal adviser bizarrely enough threatening to take The News of the World to court. He has also blamed Scotland Yard for initiating investigations on the basis of the story. The evidence produced by the paper – which looks for now pretty irrefutable – has been conveniently brushed aside.

We must not be so cowardly. The only honourable thing to do is to accept that things may indeed be wrong. Rather than covering them up, we need to take on the problem head on. Let us not forget that somewhere in the PCB cabinets in Lahore lie documents suggesting suspicions against several Pakistani players from past months and years. Given the amounts involved in the fixing business, it is safe to assume the paltry fines will not have deterred them. Fixers with the experience of Majid also specialise in luring players into the wicked web of fixing, until, bound by metres of carefully spun sticky threads they cannot escape even if they wish too. Many cricketers from the past can describe how this happens. The ‘spot-fixing’ some insist is harmless actually represents a first step along this perilous route.

If other young men with immense talent are to be prevented from walking down the same slippery slope a very solid fence needs to be put up and the coy insistence that all is well abandoned.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 1^st, 2010.