Masterminds running the sinister criminal empire “Spectre” in James Bond movies could be novices compared to how the crooked and the damned reappear to haunt Pakistan and India.
By Raja Murthy
Emotional dramas, as after the last major match-fixing scandal in 2000, were played out on Sunday, August 29, after the News of the World released stunning videos of what appears to be perhaps the most clear-cut proof ever publicly made available of mafia-engineered racketeering in sports.
News of the World video footage showed a London-based players “agent” Mazhar Majeed purportedly accepting 150,000 pounds in currency (US$232,000) from an undercover reporter posing as representing a fictitious East Asian betting syndicate.
The pay-off was for using Pakistan national team players to fix specific match-play during a five-day Test match between Pakistan and England in Lord’s, London.
Football, basketball, even tennis have had their share of match-fixing scandals. But to the disgust and fury of millions of ardent fans in Pakistan, no international sport has had a national team so often suspected of cheating as the Pakistan cricket team.
The latest evidence was staggering. To demonstrate his apparent control over at least seven Pakistan players, Majeed told the undercover reporter a day earlier of the exact moments when two bowlers Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir would deliberately bowl “no-balls”, or over-stepping the bowling crease to make the umpire signal an illegal delivery. The “spot-fixing” exactly happened as scripted; and the game took a bullet in the credibility chest.
It was great irony. The 196-year old Lord’s ground, called the “Mecca of cricket”, became home to the biggest scandal in history of a sport often hailed as the “gentlemen’s game”.
It was also deja vu. In 2000, the Delhi police shocked the cricket fraternity by releasing taped phone conversations between the then-South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje and a local bookie, during South Africa’s tour of India. Cronje later confessed to accepting bribes from bookmakers, was banned for life, and died two years later in a mysterious air crash.
Demolishing hopes of the game being cleaner, similar scenes were replayed in London 10 years later. Detectives from the Metropolitan Police, better known as Scotland Yard, raided the Pakistani team hotel, questioned players, seized unaccounted cash from their rooms, including that of newly appointed captain Salman Butt whom the “fixer” Majeed described as “ring leader” of the racket. Majeed was arrested and released without charge on Monday.
The price of cheating punters in England is 10 years as the Queen’s guest in jail. But the Butt and Co may have to worry. Stars in earlier match fixing scandals are far away from counting prison bars.
Mohammed Azharuddin, the former India cricket captain, who was banned for life in 2000 for match fixing and selling out his team and country, is currently a member of parliament, representing the Congress Party of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Even Ripley’s might find Azharuddin’s entry into public life hard to believe. A decade after the scandal, entering “Azharuddin” in Google has the search engine automatically offering the suffix “match fixing” next to his name.
Waqar Younis, a former Pakistani cricket captain implicated in Justice Malik Qayyum’s inquiry into match fixing in the 1990s, is currently coach of the disgraced Pakistan team. Wasim Akram, also a
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