What the spot-fixing verdict cost cricket

Insufficient

25-Feb-2013

Insufficient. Harsh. Inevitable. The spot-fixing verdict has elicited all sorts of reactions around the cricketing world. Scyld Berry of the Telegraph takes a look at the three talents that have been lost, for at least the next five years.

Try standing still and, in one hand, flicking a cricket ball 180 degrees. Asif could do that when running in, in his delivery stride, an astonishing sleight of hand that only a handful of pace bowlers — at most — have mastered. The purpose is to reveal to the batsman the ball’s shiny side, then to deceive him by flicking the seam over.

By the end of the series against England, after six Tests in two months, Asif was fading — and we now know he had other things on his mind at Lord’s.

In the same paper, Berry goes on to analyse the verdict itself, and concludes that the sanctions aren't a strong enough deterrant for pontential future transgressors and, more importantly, undetected culprits still playing the game.

There is so much smoke — rumours of spot- and match-fixing — circulating in world cricket that it is very unlikely there is no fire. And those already engaged are going to look at the sentences dished out in Doha and work out that the reprisals they will face from the underworld for ceasing to match-fix are far worse than a five-year ban.

Given Mohammad Amir's age and background, the tribunal should have not come down so hard on him, writes James Lawton in the Independent. He says, the officials who allowed Amir to be corrupted thus should have been the ones taking the rap.

The ICC put three cricketers in the dock but you have to ask the whereabouts of the people who were in charge of Amir's well-being, the Pakistani officials who left their team quarters open to the forays of a man charged with setting up irrefutable evidence that he could, for an agreed fee, engineer corrupt behaviour on the field? No one was saying that if proven guilty Amir should escape any form of punishment, only that there should be an understanding of his quite grotesquely vulnerable position.

Nitin Sundar is a sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo