Is there a suggestion of a ‘Holier than thou’ attitude to be seen in Graeme Swann’s belief that cricket cheat Mohammas Amir’s return to the hallowed turf of Lord’s sickens him Is there a suggestion of a ‘Holier than thou’ attitude to be seen in Graeme Swann’s belief that cricket cheat Mohammas Amir’s return to the hallowed turf of Lord’s sickens him “This is a man who crushed the morality of the game. Many of those involved in the first great betting scandal of the ‘90s had reason to be ashamed of the things they did in cohorts with betting contacts. Also, this was not Indian cricket’s first great cricketing scandal. But then it can be said that he was more unfortunate than many fellow cricketers who had dabbled in worse things and got away with it.” And the involvement of the few players who were sanctioned and banned was only the tip of the iceberg.. As someone explained once, “It takes a jockey to pull a horse. It took another blowout from within the game for the betting and fixing scandals of the IPL to become so big that there was no hiding the ‘pumpkin’ in the rice as the saying goes. Compared to all this, the foolish thing that Amir did was almost a piffle although he paid a far higher price in being jailed in a foreign land.
The full blown scandal finally brought things to such a head that a defiant BCCI was taken to task by Supreme Court appointed panels, the first of which, headed by Justice Mukund Mudgal, went into the heart of the scandal of players spot-fixing and a team principal betting from the dugout as it were. Perhaps, there is place for the point of view that the disgraced Pakistan fast bowler has not paid the consequences for his part in the corruption scandal involving spot-fixing.The BCCI’s stand that the players were innocent and that all the evil flowed from the bookies of the betting market stood exposed. The sheer shock value of rich sportsmen indulging in something as low as fixing should have alerted the authorities to doing something about it. So, it’s best that a reformed Amir be allowed to play on provided he stays clean. At the height of the first scandal, the Aussies were those with the worst ‘holier than thou’ attitude and yet the cricket board did very little about the involvement of Shane Warne and Mark Waugh except to fine them a token sum, which punishment was later used to protect them from double jeopardy. To believe cricket could ever survive in its so-called innocent form was always a pipedream.Cricket lost its morality long ago, perhaps soon after its birth when it became the most popular medium for wagers. The IPL probably made matters considerably worse with many a nouveau multimillionaire of the game still indulging in questionable match and spot-fixing practices.
