The best and worst of 2010

Highlight of the year:
England’s success in the World T20.
Until May, England held an unwanted record in limited-overs cricket. Of all the ever-present Test-playing nations over the last 25 years, England were the only side not to have won a global tournament. West Indies, India, Pakistan, Australia, Sri Lanka and New Zealand all had better records.
All that changed in May. Stung by a series of embarrassing reverses, England coach Andy Flower resolved to adopt a bold, new approach. As Paul Collingwood, England’s T20- captain put it: “It got to the point, last year, when the two Andys [Flower and Strauss] said, ‘Look, we’ve got to do things differently. If we continue to do the same old things, we’ll continue to get the same old results.’ England have never really done very well in one-day cricket. I remember in my early days Duncan Fletcher used to tell us, “Just bat though the 50 overs in a one-day international, because we kept getting bowled out in 40 overs. Our aim was just to bat 50 overs!”
So England selected a new-look side. In it were the likes of Michael Lumb, Michael Yardy, Ryan Sidebottom and Craig Kieswetter – all of whom might be considered T20 specialists – and all of whom combined to form a far more positive, athletic and fearless team than England ever before fielded.
Kevin Pietersen batted brilliantly, Graeme Swann bowled superbly and all their colleagues chipped in with bat, ball and in the field. There was nothing lucky about England’s success: the best team won.

Lowlight of the year
The match-fixing scandal.
It was surely fitting that the news broke during an epic Test at Lord’s – the home of cricket – that should have captivated spectators.
An outrageously talented, young fast bowler – Mohammad Amir – was doing battle with England’s golden boy – Stuart Broad – in a wonderfully entertaining game.
But then ‘those’ pictures were published. Pictures that proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that Pakistan players were taking money in exchange for match-fixing. Amir was right in the thick of it, but the episode has raised serious questions about many of his team-mates and Pakistan cricket in general. It’s no exaggeration to say that the integrity of the sport has never been so badly compromised.
There is a bright side. Such has been the furore around the story that the ICC have finally been forced to confront a cancer that has eaten away at the game for years. Several players face lengthy bans, though it is hard to see how the game can really be clean while Pakistan cricket – rotten to its core – is allowed to compete at world level. Just as it is sometimes necessary to cut off a limb to save a body, so Pakistan cricket requires a substantial period in isolation before we can be assured it will not poison the rest of world cricket.

Comeback of the year:
Worcestershire.
Few gave Worcestershire much hope of success in 2010. After a horrid 2009 saw them relegated after going through the whole Championship season without a win, they then lost five senior players (Kabir Ali, Steve Davies, Stephen Moore, Gareth Batty and Simon Jones) to other counties and had to cut their cricket budget by £300,000.
Yet, thanks to a strong team spirit, some astute recruiting – Alan Richardson and Shakib-Al-Hasan in particular – and some encouraging performances from young players such as Moeen Ali and Alexei Kervezee, Worcestershire achieved an unlikely but thoroughly deserved promotion.
There were still some poor days – remember that loss against the Unicorns? – that suggest Worcestershire remain a work in progress but, with results showing a marked resurgence once Daryl Mitchell assumed the captaincy (they won four CB40 games in and four of their last six Championship games) they may shock a few in 2011, too.
Chris Tremlett also deserves a mention in this category. At the end of 2009, Tremlett was unwanted by Hampshire and in danger of drifting out of the game as a massively unfulfilled talent. Barely 12-months later, however, he has developed into the world-class fast bowler his talent always suggested he could become and is an automatic selection in the England side.

Man of the year
Zulqarnain Haider
He may never have made a huge impression as a player – he played only one Test, after all – but the world of cricket may yet come to be most grateful for Zulqarnain Haider’s contribution.
Haider, a wicket-keeper batsman on the fringes of the Pakistan side, not only declined the overtures of those wanting to lure him into match-fixing, but blew the whistle on their entire operation.
It was a brave move. Not only did it end Haider’s hopes of a career in international cricket, but it may well have jeopardised his safety and the safety of his family. If, as suspected, the roots of match-fixing spread into the worlds of terrorism and organised crime, then Haider has made some powerful enemies. He recently sought asylum in the UK and may require protection for the rest of his life.
The reaction of many involved in cricket in Pakistan spoke volumes. Instead of offering Haider support, he was ridiculed. The reason? His information promises to bring down many players and officials who have made vast sums from match-fixing. It was also telling that Haider reported his concerns not to the cricketing authorities, but to the media. It suggests, surely, how much confidence he had in the game’s governing body to deal with such a serious situation. Remember, it was the media – not the much-vaunted Anti-Corruption Unit – that uncovered the Pakistan match-fixing story in the first place.

Batsman of the year:
Alastair Cook.
Within an ace of being dropped late into the English summer, Cook has responded with a run of form so purple that it threatens records only Don Bradman could reach. Cook has produced match-turning innings in four of his last six Tests and, after 695 runs at an average of 116 a time (with power to add) is fully vindicating the England selectors’ admirable faith in him.

Bowler of the year:
Graeme Swan
Most people thought off-spin was a dying art. Particularly if the spinner didn’t have the ability to bowl the ‘doosra’; a delivery that many feel is impossible without being chucked in any case.
But then Swann came along. With the old-fashioned virtues of flight, control, variation and turn, Swann has claimed 62 Test wickets at 26 apiece this year (with power to add) and played a key role in England’s World T20 triumph. He rose to second in the world Test ratings, third in the ODI ratings and proved that hard work, intelligence and perseverance are qualities that never lose their value at any level of the game.

Near miss of the year:
Somerset.
Runners-up in all three domestic competitions, it was hard not to feel sorry for Somerset in 2010. They remain one of the few counties never to have won the county championship but, having strengthened once again this winter, may well break their duck in 2011.

Pakistani ‘match-fixing’: Yasir Hameed’s mental age and Test average and the culture of cash in envelopes

Given the week we’ve had, I think the overall feeling at Sunday’s fresh revelations in the News of the World was relief. Certainly, the allegations against the three suspended Pakistani players and their erstwhile agent now seem even more serious and even more nailed-on (allegedly). But the thing that everyone in cricket fears is that spot-fixing is not just a Pakistani problem but is endemic, either in other Test teams or domestic cricket.

We’ve already heard players from other countries coming forward to say they have been approached.

For all the reasons why Pakistan has the potential to be a hotbed of match-fixing, it would be odd if the problem had only touched one team.

Wouldn’t it?

I tried to say all this on my latest media call-up on Sky News at 8am this morning.

Anyway, if you’re still looking for more angles and hints about where the story may go next, check out this allegation from a Bangladeshi paper that all but names a fourth alleged match-fixer. (Of course, it has been confirmed that the ICC has written to Kamran Akmal and we know that he was accused of liaising with bookies by the team management after the Australia tour. But this piece suggests a player in the Test team with ICL connections, which doesn’t leave much scope for error.)

Obviously, Afridi’s comment on Yasir Hameed having the mental age of a 15 year old was the genius we have come to expect from the great man. I don’t know Hameed but I can tell that he has the maths ability of – what? – a five year old. Hameed suggests to the News of the World (now of course he denies giving the interview at all, though he appears to have been filmed giving it which might be a clincher) that he has a Test average of 39 and in any other country he would be captain by now. He has, he says, only been kept under by refusing to go along with the match-fixers.

Two points:

1) How does he explain his recent recall the the side under Salman Butt? and

2) How does he explain the fact that cricinfo have his average as 32. Conspiracy?

Anyway, side issues in the scheme of things.

Something I haven’t yet had time to expand on on here is the milieu that surrounds the Pakistan team when they are on tour. As editor of SPIN I have, on previous tours, been approached by two or three ‘agents’ representing the same player and offering to arrange interviews in return for money. Often these players have an official ‘mainstream’ agent as well as a roster of friends and friends of friends – not to say hangers-on – who act on their behalf informally.

There’s a good recent piece by Dominic Lawson talking about giving Wasim Akram £1000 in cash to arrange a column with Shoaib Akhtar a decade ago. No dodgy dealing is implied there; rather, it illustrates an ad hoc, cash-in-envelopes way of doing business that, allied to the ease with which ‘friends’ can get close to players and start to act as their agents surely spells bad news.

I was editing another magazine during the Pakistan tour of 2001 and arranged a series of columns with one of the side’s star players. Like Akram in the above piece, he wanted to be paid in cash, cash in an envelope given to a go-between. Again, nothing dodgy: I was a bona fide journalist, ghosting bona fide columns but the whole way the player and the team went about things was redolent of something illicit or, at least, exploitable.

(Shoaib Akhtar, for whom I was also a ghost, was actually the opposite. Having spent time negotiating a fee to appear in The Guardian during the 2003 World Cup, he never managed to tell us how to get the money to him.)

You might want to ask yourself how many interviews with Pakistan players you see in the mainstream media when the team is on tour. I remember then-coach Bob Woolmer’s exasperation on the 2006 tour; he confided to me that because the team would not do media interviews apart from the bare press-conference minimum, unless they were paid, more pressure fell on his shoulders to do the team’s explaining and PR.

Of course, some teams are media friendly and some are not. But, in my experience, it has been the Pakistani players who would generally only do things if money was on the table. (It’s not necessarily easier to get big Indian stars to do stuff; but I have had the sense that if, say, Saurav Ganguly doesn’t want to talk to me, the offer of cash won’t change his mind.)

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Pakistan ‘match-fixing’: what’s wrong with this picture?

I’ve been asked to appear on a lot of radio and TV shows since the Pakistan story broke last week. So far, I’ve done nine media interviews (including a long chat with the producer of what appears to be Canada’s answer to Radio 4′s Moral Maze).

As it happens, I am reasonably well placed to comment. SPIN magazine has given a lot of space to exclusive interviews with Pakistani players over the years and I personally have picked up a lot of background information and colour along the way.

However, most of what I’ve said on Five Live, Sky News and BBC London has been based on material very much in the public domain, rather than my own inside knowledge or experience.

Oddly, however, I seem to have been one of the only people pointing some of these things out.

1) Pakistan started the current series with someone in their side who was on police bail for spot-fixing a game in England in 2009: Danish Kaneria. On police bail! In England! For allegedly spot-fixing a game in England!

Does that seem odd to you?

Shouldn’t such a player have been suspended, possibly on full pay, for the duration of an investigation? A bank manager charged with fraud would be put on paid gardening leave, with no presumption of guilt. Does logic not apply in cricket?

2) Mohammad Asif was also in the side. I love watching Asif bowl and I do wish that the following were not true. However, he has three drugs offences against his name and yet there he is/was in Pakistan’s starting XI. Look at the fuss in England over athlete Dwain Chambers being allowed to come back after ONE offence. And yet somehow cricket does not seem bothered by Asif’s case – or not sufficiently bothered to step in and do anything much about it.

3) Kamran Akmal, accused by the team manager of deliberately under-performing and having connections with bookmakers on last winter’s tour of Australia, was also in the side. Seemingly, the PCB had decided that Akmal was not dodgy in the bookmaking sense of the word but, in fact, was just a wicket-keeper who couldn’t catch. (He dropped Mike Hussey four times in Pakistan’s, um, weird defeat to Australia in Sydney.) They kept him in the side,

None of these necessarily has any direct bearing on the current case.

However, it shows an indulgence from the PCB towards its players and an indulgence from the international cricket community towards the PCB but, possibly, towards the unsavoury elements of the game in general.

A lot of shrugging and abdication of responsibility.

And remember – these bits of information are clearly in the public domain. It’s tempting to ask how much indulgence or apathy has been shown towards matters that have never reached the public domain.

As fans, we wish that things weren’t true. We don’t want to hear that Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif have failed drugs tests and won’t be going to the 2007 World Cup. We want to rewind the clock 24 hours and think it never happened and then see them in action at the tournament, two of the world’s great bowlers.

Many people wish that Mohammad Amir, in particular, was not caught up in the latest allegations.

Many within English cricket wish that it had not been recommended by Judge Qayyum’s report that Mushtaq Ahmed not ever be allowed to hold positions in team management.

But wishful thinking is not much of a way to stamp out wrong-doing or set an example or organise justice.

For five days last week, the ICC declared that it was the PCB’s decision whether to suspend the three accused players in the light of the spot-fixing allegations.

Finally, the ICC suspended the players AFTER they had voluntarily withdrawn.

Which says it all.

And no: the ICC suspending the players would not have been a presumption of guilt. It was, surely, legally quite possible, had there been the will; a way to defuse the situation and get the focus back on the game.

Other sports would look at cricket and wonder how competently our game has tried to eradicate unsavoury elements of the game – or even the circumances that have allegedly allowed them to fester.

Pakistan ‘match-fixing’: one gap in the ‘set-up’ theory

When the Pakistan High Commissioner Wajid Hasa said earlier this week that Salman Butt, Mo Amir and Mo Asif had been set-up, the reaction from most within cricket was bemusement. But now we have some flesh on the bones of that apparently left-field assertion. A daily newspaper in Pakistan has thrown a new twist onto the match-fixing story by suggesting that Messrs Butt, Asif and Amir were set-up by the Indian secret service.

The theory goes that middle-man Mazher Majeed – the man caught on film by the News of the World, allegedly offering to fix matches – was recruited by Indian intelligence body RAW some years ago and slowly given the opportunity to meet, first, Indian cricketers and then Pakistanis.

With Majeed supposedly/allegedly in the pay of the Indians, the overall idea was to demoralise Pakistan by undermining one of its most high-profile national institutions – its cricket team.

There is also a suggestion that Indian money was given to British journalists ahead of the sting.

Hard for us to know whether this is simply a disbelieving nation not wanting to believe the worst of its heroes and resorting to far-fetched conspiracy theories.

Even the Pakistani papers don’t seem to be denying the core allegations – that the players took money in return for spot fixing passages of play. Rather, they suggest that the players are victims of an inter-governmental grudge match with much higher stakes than mere cricket.

The (Pakistani) Daily Mail story has plenty of detail in it – but having been editor of a UK cricket magazine for nearly six years I can possibly pull the rug from underneath at least one part of it.

They suggest that RAW – the Indian secret service – started introducing Majeed to Indian players in 2007, as they sought to ‘embed’ him into international cricket.

Now: I know for a fact that in the summer of 2006, Mazher Majeed’s brother Azhar Majeed was already acting as an agent of a group of Pakistan players during the tour of England.

My interview with Shahid Afridi remains the longest he has done in English and is still one of the most popular stories on our site. This week, it was quoted in Guardian profile of Afridi.

I arranged that interview via Azhar Majeed – who was acting as Afridi’s agent at that time – and Majeed was present both when we did the interview at Canterbury and when we shot the photos a week or so later, near the team hotel near Lord’s.

I can’t imagine this knowledge is especially exclusive to me – yet the Pakistani media’s theories seem not to take account of it. Surely if the Indian secret service wanted to insinuate the brother of an existing agent into the world of international cricketers, it would be quite a straightforward process? The notion that the players would not already have known Mazher Majeed by 2007 would seem debatable.

It’s a small detail, but possibly significant, if the Pakistan media’s suggestions are to be examined line by line.