WORLD VIEW:Spot-bet allegations show Pakistan's cricketers playing out the story of their country's dysfunctional politics, writes PATRICK SMYTH
Cricket civilises people and creates good gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen. Robert Mugabe
IF ONLY!
“What do they know of cricket, who only know of cricket?” Jamaica’s celebrated cricketer, writer and radical political activist CLR James mused, reflecting with insight on how his beloved game embodied on the pitch all the colonial history and politics of the island. Cricket’s resonance extends beyond the “boundary” of the cricket pitch. “The cricket field,” he wrote of the sport’s place in the anti-colonial struggle, “was a stage on which selected individuals played representative roles which were charged with social significance”. (Beyond a Boundary: Cricket and West Indian Self-Determination)
James would have recognised only too clearly the political subtext of Pakistan’s latest cricketing scandal, not least the particularly galling humiliation of its having been unveiled as the national team took on the old enemy in Lords. Pakistan’s cricketers are playing out on the field the story of their country’s dysfunctional politics, the national game, a mirror of the national psyche. Patronage and money rule, incompetence, infighting, corruption and complacency in the management of the game echo the national story. This is the country, after all, whose President Asif Ali Zardari has been known for years as “Mr 10 per cent”. Chief patron of the heavily politicised Pakistan Cricket Board, he appointed its current chairman, a crony, Ijaz Butt, brother-in-law of his defence minister.
Not surprising then that, usual conspiracy theorists apart, few in Pakistan have any doubt that three players participated in the spot-betting scam exposed by Sunday’s News of the World. The cricketers – including captain Salman Butt and bowlers Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif – are accused of arranging three no-balls, where the bowler oversteps the line, at a pre-agreed time. Their half-hearted denials and attempts on Thursday by Pakistan’s High Commissioner in the UK, Wajid Hasan, to suggest the newspaper’s video evidence had been faked, have been ridiculed.
“Though we are talking allegations at this stage, it is interesting that most commentary has been tainted with ready belief,” Mariam Chaudhry, a talkshow host and broadcast journalist based in Islamabad told the Herald Tribune. “The credence given is reflective of the institutional crisis Pakistan faces, engendered by decades of ill-governance and political uncertainty.”
Imran Khan, who led Pakistan to a World Cup triumph in 1992 and now a politician, echoes that view: “When the players see corrupt politicians in governance, when they see people pardoned in financial scams, they think we can also get away with this.”
Access to huge wealth turns heads, and perhaps the saddest image of the scandal has been the sight of 18-year-old prodigious fast bowler Muhammad Amir suspended, probably for many years, just as his career was taking off. The youngest of seven children in a poor family, Amir is from Swat, until last year controlled by the Taliban. From a young age, he played the street cricket that can be seen in every village in Pakistan and is the country’s grassroots game. Amir for many millions was the epitome of their only hope of escaping enduring poverty.
The anger of the cricket followers remains palpable. Even reporting of the floods which have killed more than 1,600 people and made at least six million homeless has been sidelined. In Lahore on Tuesday, fans set their cricket bats on fire in protest. An effigy of Salman Butt was placed on a donkey and paraded around in southern Punjab. Perhaps the most radical expression of the rage of the nation has come from the Lahore High Court which accepted a petition from a lawyer accusing those involved of high treason.
Reports of corruption and other scandals have dogged Pakistani cricket for two decades, fuelled by a submerged betting industry raking in hundreds of millions a year. Questions were first raised in the mid-1990s when Australian players Shane Warne and Mark Waugh accused then captain, Salim Malik, of offering them bribes to perform poorly. In May 2000, Malik and bowler Ata-ur Rehman were found guilty of match-fixing. Malik is now back as part of the national management team.
Four years ago, the team was accused of ball-tampering during a tour to England. The Australian umpire Darrell Hair ruled that Pakistan had forfeited the Test at the Oval by refusing to take the field in protest over his ruling on the allegations. In May this year, the International Cricket Council’s anti-corruption unit looked at Pakistan’s poor performance after the team were heavily beaten by Australia.
Following reports of infighting in the team, the Pakistani cricket board banned the former captain Younus Khan and the tour captain, Mohammad Yousuf for an indefinite period. The former captain Shoaib Malik and Rana Naved-ul-Hassan were banned for one year and fined heavily.
And even Mohammad Asif, one of those now facing charges, in 2006 was banned for a year after testing positive for a steroid. Two years later, after making an unlikely comeback, he was held at Dubai airport on suspicion of possessing illegal drugs and only escaped prison thanks to intensive lobbying by the Pakistan government. Like, it seems, the whole game in Pakistan. Some people just don’t learn.