Cracks in Pakistan's class divide

Cricket has drawn Pakistani society together but now shows apparently disparate elements are more similar than people think, writes Osman Samiuddin for the Observer.

Pakistan's players do not get paid as much as counterparts around the world, it is being said. This is true. They have also missed out on the life-changing riches of the Indian Premier League. But at 250,000 rupees (£1,900), 175,000 rupees and 100,000 rupees per month in the three grades of the PCB's central contracts, they are not paid peanuts. They live in Pakistan, not India, Australia or England, and in this country that kind of salary is seen by very, very few.

Add on match fees – roughly the same again as the monthly retainer – and on‑tour fees, board and personal endorsements, salaries from their first-class sides (which are run by organisations such as banks, airlines and power companies, offering the option of a stable, secure job after retirement), deals with counties and league clubs and now Twenty20 domestic sides, and most elite players really are kings of this land.

This is why the alleged leadership of Salman Butt is the most difficult aspect to grasp. Amir's errors can too easily be explained by his youth and his background, and Asif has previous, having failed a drug test. But Butt? Whenever there is talk of him it is inevitably of his English-speaking and educated ways. He is a truly urban product, to a degree polished. "He's been brought up well," Bob Woolmer once said of him. Had he not been a cricketer, he could have been nine-to-fiving somewhere and who knows, his floppy locks might have got him into the music gig.

Has any game waged such war on its reputation as cricket? Has such a war occurred on so many fronts? asks Gideon Haigh in the Age.

The manufacturing of outcomes and the fixing of results, however, belongs to a unique category of reputational risks. Cricket's on-field blow-ups have always been about the craving of an unfair advantage, the quest for victory.

Doing the bidding of a third party for money, even on a limited scale, is no such thing. It's corrosive of trust, of credibility, of pleasure in the contest. It poisons all that surrounds it.