Reformed Amir earns right to bowl on
smokescreen for the BCCI bigwigs. They were led by precedent to believe in fixing outcomes of probes rather than facing up squarely to the problems of the sport having been so thoroughly corrupted. They never believed they could corral in the players who, by the sheer weight of their money power and glamour, seemed to have become bigger than the game. It took another blowout from within the game for the betting and fixing scandals of the IPL to become so big that there was no hiding the ‘ pumpkin’ in the rice as the saying goes.
The full blown scandal finally brought things to such a head that a defiant BCCI was taken to task by Supreme Court appointed panels, the first of which, headed by Justice Mukund Mudgal, went into the heart of the scandal of players spotfixing and a team princip albet - ting from the dugout as it were. It took exceptional action on a leading cricketer, who was a member of the T20 worlds of 2007 and the 2011 World Cup winning teams, to ring out a warning as the extent of the involvement of players in betting rackets had just come out in the open. As someone explained once, “It takes a jockey to pull a horse.” And the involvement of the few players who were sanctioned and banned was only the tip of the iceberg. The BCCI’s stand that the players were innocent and that all the evil flowed from the bookies of the betting market stood exposed. Compared to all this, the foolish thing that Amir did was almost a piffle although he paid a far higher price in being jailed in a foreign land. As an adult, he is responsible for any mistake he committed, as Swann points out. But then it can be said that he was more unfortunate than many fellow cricketers who had dabbled in worse things and got away with it.
At the height of the first scandal, the Aussies were those with the worst ‘ holier than thou’ attitude and yet the cricket board did very little about the involvement of Shane Warne and Mark Waugh except to fine them a token sum, which punishment was later used to protect them from double jeopardy.
As I have said before, only one or two cricketers had such integrity as to be way above the temptations of the dark forces. Many of those involved in the first great betting scandal of the ‘ 90s had reason to be ashamed of the things they did in cohorts with betting contacts. The most curious thing about it is the links remained for so long even after one captain and his Man Friday in these matters were banned. So, it’s best that a reformed Amir be allowed to play on provided he stays clean. If everyone had been subjected to the same kind of investigations and laws under which Amir was quartered and hung, British jails may have been full of cricketing legends.