Mega bucks and lax administration are enough to erode players’ morals
William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride was published in 1697. Act 3, Scene 8 of the play has the lines, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned”. Three hundred and thirteen years later, the lesson is still being driven home, this time in the cricket’s latest match-fixing scandal involving Pakistan’s two Ms — Asif and Aamer — two of the best young bowlers in the world, and captain Salman Butt.
What do you do in a relationship? I mean apart from the periodic bouts of emotional outpourings, expressions of love, kissing, cuddling, flowers, chocolates, eating out and cinema? Can’t think of much else? Well, ask Veena Malik, a popular actress in Pakistan and Asif’s former girlfriend. The two had a very public breakup after the cricketer married another girl, ostensibly in keeping with his family’s wishes. The actress even sued him for a tidy sum in damages for hoodwinking her.
Malik, it seems, collected evidence against Asif when she was not indulging in the aforementioned activities of a lovelorn couple. She is now raring to disclose her treasure to the world. To begin with, she says Asif is a serial match-fixer, like many others in his team, having links with several bookies. That he had told her that Pakistan would lose all its Test matches this year. Asif was wrong, given that Pakistan did win against Australia and England, but Malik, presumably, has more to offer.
The other lesson, which Congreve could not have dreamt of back then, is more urgent. The entire cricket establishment in the world needs to ask itself what makes an 18-year-old bowler of shining talent succumb to the sleazy seduction of dirty money. Aamer, the youngest bowler to capture 50 Test wickets, comes from a disadvantaged background. Pakistani cricketers do not get paid much. Add to that, the loose enforcement of laws there.
For instance, the Qayyum report of 2000 pointed the finger at nearly every big name at that time. Still, only two were banned: Ata-ur-Rehman, who did not matter much to the team, and Salim Malik, who was 37 and had played the last of his 103 Tests a year earlier. Easy money and lax administration can form a combination lethal enough to dismantle players’ ethics.
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The current flow of money into cricket and everyone’s obsession with it cannot be expected to make the players turn away from it. Young, impressionable minds would take it that all pervasive money is the reason why all cricket exists. His seniors are being weighed and measured in dollars at IPL auctions, the bosses are counting their success in terms of rights and sponsorships. If an innocuous, deliberate no-ball can get you more than your annual wages, what could possibly be wrong with that?
Perhaps, Aamer got the impression that money is never dirty, regardless of the drains it flows from. Perhaps others — senior, more experienced — goaded him, putting a price on his talent, but, at the same time, devaluing it.