The real culprit of the Lord's Test Match | Thebigtip

The cricket world is rocked by a betting scandal again. Are we surprised?

The players, the legitimate, incorruptible ones at any rate, have not been listened to. Are we surprised?

The spectators, the ones that pay £90 ($155 Australian) to witness a day at the cricket, are being forgotten again. Are we surprised?

The answer to all these questions is an emphatic “no” and it is about time that the administrators of the game wake up to this fact and start acting in a manner approaching common sense.

What clouds the whole dirty smear of the Lord’s Test Match is the fact that it involved the Pakistan team, and this is where people need to be very wary in their reaction. Four days in to the seedy revelations there are already questions being asked in back-handed pseudo-racism terms about the culture of that particular team and country. Players have come out and said this. We, as doting spectators, then hark back to any given dramatic collapse by that side and wonder many things.

We think of the allegations that the Australia-Pakistan Test Match in Sydney this year was “fixed”; we think of Saleem Malik in the 1990’s; of Wasim Akram getting off so lightly; of Shahid Afridi biting the ball; we remember every small score that they get bowled out for; and we get worked up that Pakistan is the only country that does this sort of stuff, the only one that brings the game into disrepute; their culture must be flawed, and this, I am afraid, is racism.

Racism is small mindedness, the inability to see the big picture. In this instance there are two parts to why Pakistan is not the only problem gambling in cricket has created.

The first is that other countries have experienced similar fates. Hansie Cronje, the South African captain, led three of his teammates in a fixing ring and he was introduced to bookmakers by Indian captain Mohammad Azharuddin.

West Indian Marlon Samuels has only recently served a ban for handing information to bookmakers.

In Australia Mark Waugh and Shane Warne were both fined for their involvement with a bookmaker in the 1990’s.

Add to these famous instances a handful of other Indian and Pakistan players, even a Kenyan player, the argument that corruption exists in only one country is ludicrous.

But the major problem with cricket and the reason why Pakistan gets awarded the Cheater’s World Cup by a lot of people is the International Cricket Committee itself who are so intent on pleasing everybody, of looking after themselves; they rarely hand out justice and rarely have transparency.

If you visit the ICC website and search for corruption reports, the first (and last) one available is from 2001. Hardly an inspiring circumstance.

When the chief of the Anti-Corruption arm of the ICC, Lord Condon, was appointed in the wake of the West Indies World Cup where Bob Woolmer died, the cricket world thought there was a man of a tough, no nonsense nature who would have huge powers and resources to stamp out corruption. At his farewell press conference in May he stated that spot-fixing, the form of betting scandal that is surrounding the Pakistan squad at the moment, is rife and could quickly take over the game.

What was never said was exactly what the commission was doing to get rid of it. It took a tabloid newspaper in England just one investigative reporter to uncover a major conspiracy. Just one.

How is it possible that millions can be poured into “anti-corruption” with relatively little results and the News of the World can pay £150,000 and get more done in two weeks?

Then it is revealed that the ICC had these players on their watch list for some time! Why weren’t they removed from the game? It is a disgrace and a circumstance that the ICC should be thoroughly embarrassed about.

And let us think about the players that do not cheat, particularly those that played in this Test Match. What possibly could have been going through the English players’ minds stepping onto the fabled Lord’s ground knowing what had occurred the night before?

Surely one of the questions would have been ‘why are we here?’ The image of the English players in a victorious photo with the series trophy is one that depicts the moment succinctly - most manage a bit of a smile, some look glum; one does not even look at the camera.

Imagine what the clean Pakistani players were thinking having to room with these players, surely there were heated moments staring across the dining table that night, surely some of them thought about not turning up the next day.

The main beef that international players have is that their administrators and the ICC do not explain situations well and are not hard enough on offenders. It has been alleged that contact with the arrested fixer was banned by the Pakistan hierarchy before the tour began, but no one seems to explain why he was in the player’s dressing room during matches as a player agent.

The amount of advice that players get totals up to telling team managers about people who approach them with bribe-like deals, the situation Shane Watson dealt well with last year. Maybe the ICC should produce reports every month to distribute to all international players, some may be bland and not very useful, but some may have very handy information for players and at least the reports will get them talking about the situation, maybe even asking questions. Ignorance leads to anger and the players are most displeased.

The other factor in the history of these types of scandals is the punishments handed out to players when caught. It seems very arbitrary, lacking in cohesion and at times, authority.

The Australian Cricket Board fined Waugh and Warne less than a combined $20,000, a paltry sum which should have been a ban of at least a year; Wasim Akram got let off his potential suspension because the QC in charge liked him as a player; Herschelle Gibbs got six months out of the game for agreeing to under-perform with his savior being that he did not go through with the arrangement.