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Butt, Asif and Aamer guilty verdicts raises more critical questions

The guilty verdicts handed out to Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif

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Butt, Asif & Aamer guilty verdicts raises more critical questions

The Pakistan trio of Mohammad Aamer (left), Salman But (centre) and Mohammad Asif were found guilty in one of the biggest scandals that rocked cricket last year © Getty Images

 

By David Green

 

The guilty verdicts handed out to Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif sadly came as no surprise given the evidence and the fact that Mohammad Aamer had already entered a guilty plea at the outset of the trial.

 

But were the deliberate no-balls that eventually led to the trio potentially losing their liberty as well as their livelihood just the tip of a particularly foul-smelling iceberg?

 

Whilst most of the claims of Mazhar Majeed made to the undercover News of the World reporter can perhaps be dismissed as fantasy, one in particular demands further investigation by the authorities.

 

Majeed also claimed to have Kamran Akmal, Umar Akmal, Wahab Riaz and Imran Farhat under his control, which if so prompts a number of questions about that England-Pakistan series alone.

 

For instance, Pakistan were bowled out for scores of 80, 72 and 74 over the four Test series. Was this, as it seemed at the time, due to England’s masterful bowling attack or was there something far more sinister afoot?

 

Was Kamran Akmal’s atrocious performance behind the stumps at Trent Bridge (and Sydney the same year for that matter) and pair in the same match simply evidence that he was the worst ‘keeper in the history of international cricket? Or was he merely following orders?

 

Did brother Umar deliberately run himself out in the first innings at The Oval?

 

What about Imran Farhat’s bizarre 24-ball duck at Edgbaston?

 

And then there was Wahab Riaz’s five no-balls on debut at The Oval where like Aamer at Lord’s, he starred with the ball.

 

The first reaction to the guilty verdicts is to ask what else was dirty. All the incidents referred to above could have been something or nothing. What are we to believe? This is the epitaph of Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Aamer’s wanton selfish act.

 

People laughed at the match-fixing claims of Yasir Hameed and Zulqarnain Haider that followed in the wake of the News of the World bombshell. How are we to view these now?

 

To their credit, the current Pakistan side have recovered well from the stain that was visited upon them by the spot-fixing scandal of Lord’s 2010. Under Misbah-ul-Haq’s astute and steady leadership, their Test performances have been consistent and improving.

 

Slowly, but surely, all of the seven players named by Majeed have been dropped from the Test side. Maybe this is a case of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) quietly repairing the damage that was wrought? Maybe it isn’t. They uncovered deliberate acts of underperformance from certain members of the squad that toured Australia in 2009-10. Were these players just trying to get their favourite appointed as captain or were they being rewarded by unknown others?

 

Whilst we should perhaps take some satisfaction from the fact that Butt will now become Butt by name and Butthole by nature should he receive a custodial sentence, all cricket fans lost something in the verdict – especially the devoted and fanatical followers of Pakistan.

 

Prison may well be the safest place for Butt and his errant former new ball pair.

 

(David Green is the brain behind the irreverent The Reverse Sweep blog and also writes for a number of cricket publications and sites such as World Cricket Watch. You can follow him on Twitter also @TheReverseSweep. David was a decent schoolboy and club cricketer (and scored his maiden 100 the same week that Sachin Tendulkar scored his first Test ton) but not good enough to fulfil his childhood dream of emulating Douglas Jardine by winning the Ashes in Australia and annoying the locals into the bargain. He now lives with his wife and two young children in the South of France and will one day write the definitive biography of Hedley Verity)

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