If Pakistani players are guilty, it must be India’s fault

So, it’s all clear now. Salman Butt, Mohammed Asif and Mohammed Amir are pure and innocent. The tape showing Majhar Majeed has been doctored; the cricket match/spot fixing is an international conspiracy against Pakistan concocted by India.

Sounds like one of those jokey e-mails that idle people send to each other? It does, but isn’t. In fact it is what the Pakistani government, its cricket establishment and even its media are saying now. Soon the crowds burning effigies of disgraced cricketers and officials will begin to set fire to effigies of Indian cricket.

We may be flabbergasted by this turn of events, but in retrospect, should we be? Pakistan, by every yardstick of governance, is a failed state and failed states need a bogeyman: India has always been Pakistan’s, to be invoked whenever there is a problem. Now that the cricket establishment there has been caught with its pants down, their backs to the wall and face full frontal exposure, what option do they have?

Actually, there is one. Which is to face up to the truth and begin a vast clean up of their thoroughly corrupted system. We don’t even have to add the safety word ‘allegedly’ here for the simple reason that Pakistani cricketers involvement with ‘fixing’ of some kind or the other goes back quite a bit and includes many players and as many as six captains.

But is such a clean up likely? The answer is a ringing ‘No’. It is ‘no’ for the same reason that no clean-up has been done for so many years, and if any cricketer has been punished at all, it has been so lightly that the punishment has been no deterrent at all. The reason for that is obvious: everyone, or almost everyone in the Pakistan cricket establishment, has some dirty little secret to hide, so how would they dare to punish others for the acts they themselves are guilty of?

The rot doesn’t stop there. It moves upwards. Up and up to the very top. Who doesn’t know the history of Asif Ali Zardari, now known as Pakistan’s president, but hitherto known as Mr Ten Percent, a man convicted of corruption by Pakistan’s judiciary, and someone who has actually spent time in jail for these offences? If corruption is rampant at the very highest level and is also public knowledge, what are the odds that corrupt behaviour soon becomes generally acceptable? It has certainly become acceptable to Pakistani generals. If any corrective action has to be taken, therefore, it will have to come under ICC pressure.

It is possible that in the face of irrefutable evidence, Pakistan’s cricket establishment might admit to the lesser charge of spot fixing, while denying the much more heinous charge of match-fixing. The former can include all kinds of things. It can include the no-balls bowled in specific order as was done in the last Lords Test. It can include a surprisingly-timed declaration (Asif Iqbal once declared Pakistan’s first innings closed a dozen runs short of India with many wickets intact. It was a tactic that made no sense at all, till it was revealed that huge bets had been placed on Pakistan scoring less than India in the first innings!)

The South African captain, the late Hansie Cronje who confessed to corrupt behaviour, indulged in spot fixing of many kinds: changing the batting order, opening the bowling with Klusener instead of Pollock, ordering one of his younger players to score less than a specified number of runs, etc. Potentially, none of these single acts could change the course of the match, so none of them could be called match fixing, but they were no less dishonourable in the overall scheme of things.

That’s because even a minor act like changing the batting order establishes a nexus between cricketers and the betting mafia, a nexus which ultimately only one side can win. Secondly, it’s a well known aspect of human nature that the first transgression of an established moral code is always the most difficult. Once that has occurred, the next one is easier.

An objective assessment will tell us that it is difficult for a whole test to be fixed. Too many people have to cooperate with the fixing, possibly the whole team. You may have bribed the top five batsmen to fail, but your Number 9 batsman can unexpectedly score a century (as Stuart Broad did recently). Or you might bribe the top four bowlers to underperform but an occasional bowler can suddenly develop a golden arm (Remember those wickets Michael Clark took against India for an Australian victory?)

Ultimately, though, that is beside the point. Even spot fixing is lethal to cricket because it destroys the very credibility of cricket and cricketers. A fielder may drop a catch and everyone will say he was bribed to do it. A batsman’s duck will be viewed with suspicion.

That is why the current episode of spot fixing has to be dealt with severely in spite of the Pakistan Cricket Board’s state of denial. There can be no half-measures.