Is cricket cricket now?

So, the trio of Butt, Asif and Amir have got their sentences. We wanted them hung, drawn and quartered. The argument was simple: the three have disgraced Pakistan, brought disrepute to Pakistan cricket, let down the cricket-mad Pakistani nation, they must pay for it.

Why do I find it difficult to share in this rage against them? Or, feel that while it is important to clean up the game and make people accountable, it is advisable to place the corruption of these boys in a broader context, the money and gambling racket whose tentacles are everywhere and which is sponsored by people who use these players as pawns?

Of course, individual greed plays its role. Some players are more amenable to it than others. That is how it works everywhere. One Pakistani player defected and publicly recorded the fact that he was threatened by the mafia if he didn’t play to lose. Someone else would decide to play along if that’s the only game in town.

I was sitting vis-à-vis Salman Butt only a couple of weeks ago, a chance meeting at a dinner, trying to get a sense of what was going on. He was tense. He expressed the hope that he wouldn’t be indicted because Amir had confessed. I got the feeling that Asif and he, the two senior players, along with their lawyers perhaps, had devised a plan to get Amir to confess so the other two could probably walk away from the mess. Amir, for his part, was likely to get a lenient sentence, if at all, and the damn nightmare would be over.

I am no lawyer but I came away from that chance meeting with two thoughts: their plan, if it could be called that, was clever by half and unlikely to succeed. And the two seniors were being selfish in their hope that by presenting Amir as the sacrificial lamb they would escape the knife. Deep down, however, I could sense Butt’s unease. He wasn’t sure it would work but that was his only hope.

I felt sorry for them.

Now they have turned upon each other. Accusations are flying thick and fast. We are commenting on how the covenant among thieves has fallen apart. Another disgrace has been added to their already disgraced personas.

It is so easy, commenting, when we face no real moral challenge ourselves. When we are down and out, not all of us can pen a beauty like George Orwell. Most of us will either beg and short-change or knife and mug others, depending on how we are constituted. But the moral challenge doesn’t only and always reside in adversity. Prosperity is equally susceptible to falling prey to greed or we wouldn’t have had Rajaratnams of the world making fast bucks through, as in his case, insider trading.

Moral challenge is tricky business and one doesn’t need to read the trolley experiments to figure out its complexities. William Golding tried to start with school children marooned on an island to see how they would interact and found that before long the island resembled the world we are so familiar with: competition, aggression, vanity, greed, struggle for resources, all the assorted sins, biblical and secular.

The case of these cricketers is of people caught between the two extremes of rags and riches. Many, like Asif and Amir, make it big and lose perspective. I am less sympathetic to Butt on that score. He should have acted with more sense both because he was the skipper and because he didn’t come from the street. Yet, as I noted, prosperity may not be a thwarting factor in playing such games on and off field.

Now they have had their comeuppance. Butt has not only paid for it through a wrecked career but more personally by having his child’s birthday on the same day that he was found guilty. That is a recurring motif he will have to live with for the rest of his life – it’s a terrible punishment that I’d not wish on anyone.

But what does make me angry is the fact that in this sorry saga no one has paid attention to the absolutely unsavoury role of Pakistan Cricket Board, the body that must be blamed primarily for this turn of events. The PCB is supposed to promote cricket: find young cricketers, train and groom them, keep an eye on their activities and when needed, punish them to send a message to everyone that any behaviour that is not cricket will not be tolerated.

If this is the role PCB has to play and we are agreed on it, then we can be absolutely sure on the basis of empirical evidence that it has failed to play it. Even in cases where it has sought to punish players for being out of line, it has done so either belatedly or half-heartedly. It allowed or tolerated many misdemeanours by senior players and because none was really punished, the PCB laid the ground for junior players to emulate bad examples. Leadership requires setting the right example. Going by that, these players played on the pitch prepared for them by the PCB. If the PCB had taken cognisance of this issue at home, we would have been spared this saga in an English court.

Finally, what about the money flowing into the game and impacting players? Money is good, we are told, it helps the game and the players. Not always, I say. Rashid Latif blew the whistle on what money was doing back in the mid-90s. Talk to anyone who observes cricket and they would tell you how powerful the mafias have become. And yes, they can, and actually kill people. It’s billions of dollars we are talking about. There are nexus players between big business and crime syndicates. And much of this money resides in India, the country where millions of fans help sponsors make mega bucks.

Not all of this money and activity is illegit. But much of it is. The line that separates the legal from the illegal gets diffused at many places. The big players can have teams of smart lawyers and accountants who are the sherpas in this terrain. Taking out cricket players is fine; it should be done. But that is just mopping up the floor. The court in London might like to look at the tap that’s running and would continue to run long after the trio of Butt, Asif and Amir are pushed into oblivion, left to deal with their disgrace privately.

The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.