Latest News on England - Pakistan Final Test Match Fixing Scandal

Ultimately, Pakistan lost the fourth Test by the massive margin of an innings and 225 runs. Graeme Swann took five wickets to end with match figures of 9-74 (curiously the Pakistani total in their first innings). Umar Akmal made a fifty, bringing a small measure of joy to at least one of the beleaguered Pakistan team. Does any of it matter though?

Let us put things into some sort of perspective here. Nothing has been proven, but such is the outcry at this story of pakistan cricket match fixing in certain quarters that we are in danger of creating a whole new standard of proof - 'innocent until proven Pakistani'. If - and it is still a big IF - any player has done anything wrong, it will not be the first time and it certainly will not be the last that cricket has found itself amid a match fixing scandal. In fact, there is an ongoing investigation into the actions of Danish Kaneria (who was also a member of this Pakistan squad until after the first Test) and his Essex teammate Mervyn Westfield during certain games last season.

Before that, the writers of the radio sitcom 'Old Harry's Game' had used cricket as an example of all that was venal and wrong with the world. Their script took the problem to it's extreme, with batsmen appealing for lbw against themselves and umpires on their radios to their bookmakers. The problem is that in any comedy there has to be a rich vein of truth and the fact that the rest of us have to face is that cricket, as a sport, is ripe for this kind of corruption.

It has always puzzled me that bookmakers, respectable ones well versed in the risks of their profession, would offer cricket betting odds on something as easy to fix as, say, the first ball of an innings. Cricket is a sport like no other in the way that it offers the opportunity for one player to cheat without the connivance or interference of any team mate, so if I want to bowl the first ball of the match for five wides, as Mohammed Amir did in this game, then it is going to be very hard for any of the other ten players on my team to stop me. Why, then, were bookmakers offering odds of anything from 10-1 to 14-1 on the first ball of the game being a wide? Why, indeed, were they offering that bet at all, given how easy it would be to fix.

Read the history of Cricket Match Fixing Scandal as it unfolded.

Bets involving bowlers are much safer for bookmakers, because to a certain extent they control their own destiny. Batsmen are trickier, because they are always one good ball away from being out. For this reason, no batsman is going to guarantee to score a certain amount and, whilst scoring less than a particular score is safer, there is always the risk of something going wrong due to an accidental edge, a dropped catch, or in the famous case of Herschelle Gibbs which came to light during the Cronje enquiry, the batsman forgetting how many he was supposed to get out for.

It has not just been this Test which has raised eyebrows. In the last game, Alistair Cook reached his hundred when Mohammed Asif somehow managed to throw the ball back over his wicketkeeper's head and too the boundary for four. I flagged this up as being something extraordinary at the time and now it seems as if, sadly, my fears were right.

A lot of the outrage at this story has also been curiously directed. So many people seem less upset about the taint on the game than they do about the involvement of Amir, the boy wonder of international cricket. There isn't another way of looking at this. Amir is eighteen, an adult in the eyes of the law. He is to be expected to know right from wrong and to resist peer pressure. If he is guilty of the things alleged against him, he deserves no greater or lesser punishment that the others involved."

As for Asif, a man who has already received one ban for taking a banned substance and also found himself in a Dubai jail for possessing drugs illegal in that country, that he could find himself embroiled in controversy again suggests that he is either extremely unlucky or extremely stupid. I do hope that it is merely the former.

However things do not look good for Asif, indeed his girlfriend, Meena Valik, a popular Pakistani actress claims to have proof that the bowler was in contact with bookmakers and also of his involvement in match fixing.  She claims that  "Asif used to call up this Indian bookmaker and other bookies as well on the phone of his servant. I have evidence of the messages he exchanged with the bookies".

The agent at the center of the allegations, Mahzar Majeed,  has apparently been released on bail and the Pakistani President, Asif Ali Zardari, has stated that if any of these allegations are proven then the players involved will not represent their country again.  

In the end, though, it is those who make the betting markets who also have to look to themselves. For all the while that some of the bets available out there are there - be they fixed odds on certain, very controllable, events or even spread bets on the score of individual players, then there will be players and others who will delight in taking advantage, no matter how against the rules it is.

** 31/08/2010 LATEST UPDATE ON PAKISTAN CRICKET MATCH FIXING **

To little surprise, the  International Cricket Council have told England, Pakistan and the rest of the cricketing world that fixtures arranged with Pakistan must continue to be played, including the coming one day series in England. The ICC clearly believe that the current scandal should not be allowed to derail the Future Tours programme that took so long to put in place and, in fairness to them, it is probably the correct approach. Why should the whole game stop just because of this?

The word from the Pakistani camp, now based in Taunton ahead of a warm up one day game against Somerset on Thursday, is that Salman Butt, Mohammed Amir and Mohammed Asif will almost certainly not be picked for any of the one day games whilst they remain under investigation and some Pakistani newswires are reporting that they are being prevented from practising with the team at all.

The position of the fourth player named by the News of the World, Kamran Akmal, is more complex. After the injury to Zulqarnain Haider earlier in the tour, Pakistan do not have another wicketkeeper to call upon. Whilst they would probably rather not play Akmal, the alternative would be to use a specialist batsman to keep wicket and therefore they are being forced to choose the lesser of two evils. Expect them to decide that the risk of anything untoward happening is sufficiently reduced if Kamran is isolated from his alleged co-conspirators, as seems to be happening.

Probably the most dramatic news has come from Pakistan, where a lawyer, Istiaq Ahmed Chaudhry, has filed treason charges against the four named Pakistan players, plus three others. This is interesting for two reasons, neither of which is the fact that the offence of treason carries the death penalty in Pakistan. First of all, it suggests that whilst the News of the World hinted that seven players were involved (the fixer Majid boasted that he had seven players on his payroll), the names of three of them have not been released - yet it seems that their identities are known in Pakistan.

Second, the charges, and the fact that there is a court hearing now fixed for next Tuesday, would seem to make it unlikely that any of the accused players will actually be sent home. Indeed, given the choice between a seven year jail term in England and what might await them in Pakistan, they may decide never to go home.