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’: 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.