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.