Yasir Hameed on the spot in new match fixing allegations

Either some of Pakistan’s cricketers are a little bit slow or the News of the World are bloody good. My money’s on the latter. Cricket fans woke up this morning to the news that the paper has now got footage of Yasir Hameed making admissions about alleged corruption in cricket. The Pakistani batsman seems to claim that fixing of some description happens in ‘almost every match’. The grainy images also appeared to show Hameed admitting that the Sydney Test between Pakistan and Australia was  corrupt – a figure of £1.8 million was mooted (although the details of how this sum was ‘earned’ and how it was shared out was not clear from the footage we’ve seen).

You’d think Hameed would have known better than to talk candidly to strangers – but apparently not. However, he’s not the first victim of the News of the World’s MI5 style journalistic prowess. Sven Goran Eriksson got totally sucked in by the fake Sheik ploy a few years ago. Meanwhile, Mahzar Majeed was naive enough to be caught on camera counting a giant stack of green queens. Sven and Majeed are not idiots – therefore one can only conclude that the News of the World undercover reporters are masters of disguise and espionage. Perhaps they’d be better employed as spooks? If we put them behind enemy lines in Afghanistan, they’d probably find Osama Bin Laden within hours.

In the interests of fairness, we must point out that Hameed has denied any contact with English journalists. However, we’re not entirely sure whether he’s grasped the fact that the reporters in question were undercover – and therefore wouldn’t exactly have been wearing their press badges at the time they talked to him. The Pakistan players do seem a little naive. You’d have thought they would have realised by now that the walls have ears. The last thing the squad needed in the current circumstances was a player bragging about corruption to a man showing an unhealthy interest in what was one of the most suspicious test matches in history.

Whether the News of the World footage is genuine or not, the fact that new allegations have been made is more bad news for cricket. We were hoping that the upcoming T20 matches and the subsequent ODIs would put cricket back in the news for the right reasons. However, our suspicion is that this corruption scandal will now run and run. In the meantime, every time a Pakistan batsman gets out playing a bad shot, or a fielder drops a catch, spectators will look at each other uncomfortably and wonder whether it was deliberate. Go back and watch the catches Kamral Akmal dropped at Sydney (they must be on YouTube). Eye brows were raised at the time, but hell will be raised if something similar happens in the next couple of weeks.

James Morgan

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER

copywriter copywriting