Cricket feels burden of proof
With criminal convictions looking increasingly unlikely, the game's corruption unit will pick up the investigation into the Pakistan betting scandal, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian .
George Binoy
25-Feb-2013
With criminal convictions looking increasingly unlikely, the game's corruption unit will pick up the investigation into the Pakistan betting scandal, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian.
What happens to the three Pakistan cricketers under investigation is another matter. On the face of it, the News of the World appeared to have managed a perfect sting, where the subject Mazhar Majeed seemed able to satisfy that paper of his ability to manipulate events within matches. The no-balls at Lord's, apparently to order, appeared to verify this. However, anyone who has had a cursory look at the 2005 Gambling Act will understand the difficulty in converting allegations into convictions, given the demand for hard evidence that, say, the bowling of such no-balls is directly associated with the sort of criminal gambling activities that are also alleged. There has to be a paper trail.
After a bizarre day that featured half-baked briefings, backstage maneouvrings and a clumsy Pakistani counter-attack, the International Cricket Council finally made its presence felt in this sad and unedifying story, writes Derek Pringle in the Telegraph.
The tipping point for England seems to have been the comments Ijaz Butt, the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, made at 9pm on Wednesday. In an interview with the BBC, Butt was adamant that the three would remain part of the tour, unless they were charged with an offence. Outraged that Pakistan could be such ungrateful guests, after the summer’s mercy mission that brought them Tests against Australia, the ECB’s top brass swung into action.
Forthright talks ensued through the night, between Butt, Giles Clarke and David Collier, the ECB’s chairman and chief executive, as well as Haroon Lorgat, the chief executive of the International Cricket Council. Nobody would officially confirm the precise content of the discussions but it would have been surprising if they had not pointed out what Pakistan cricket stood to lose by playing hardball over the players given the damning nature of the News of the World’s dossier.
In the Back Page Lead, Malcolm Knox questions the intelligence of the kind of bookmaker who takes bets on something so specific and meaningless as a no-ball at a particular instant, that in most cases should betray prior knowledge. He also manages to find a silver lining around the dark cloud that has emerged because of this scandal.
If bookmakers are stupid enough to take spot bets that are fixed, and players are corruptible, then the result will be that the bookmakers will be stung often enough to refuse taking such bets. If the Pakistan players are corrupt all or most of the time, the market would have become a sham and would have ceased to exist. The fact that the market does exist tells us one thing: most of the time, the players are trying their hardest. When they are not, they are choosing their moments selectively. Otherwise there would be no bookies left to fool.
George Binoy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo