Thaindian News

Islamabad, Nov 3 (IANS) It is a sad time for Pakistan cricket with a London court finding former Pakistan captain Salman Butt and fast bowler Muhammad Asif guilty of corruption, said a daily while stressing the need to “clean up our domestic game”.

The court found Butt and Asif guilty of cheating and corruption and they have already been banned from international cricket for five years.

The News International Thursday said in an editorial: “We had long suspected this would happen, since the now defunct News of the World broke news of the spot-fixing saga, backed by recordings of conversations between an undercover reporter and agent Mazhar Majeed.”

“For Pakistan cricket, this is a very sad time. But what the new management at the PCB (Pakistan Cricket Board) needs to ask is if we have brought it upon ourselves by turning a blind eye to fixing for too long.

“After a huge scandal erupted in the late 1990s, some cricketers were banned. Former captain Saleem Malik was the most prominent among them. But numerous others went unpunished…”

It said that “too little was done” to solve the matter, and “most close observers of the game in the country will testify to the fact that fixing is very much part of the first class game in the country”.

The editorial added that spot fixing, “where a particular event in a game is pre-determined, is believed to have been born in the sub-continent”.

“We need to clean up our domestic game, even though this is a mammoth job. We also need to teach our cricketers to remember the significance of wearing the national colours.

“It is true that corruption in cricket exists elsewhere too, but that still doesn’t make it acceptable. Pakistan’s name has crept up a little too often in match-fixing and spot-fixing scandals. We must act now to ensure this does not happen again in the future and that we never face the embarrassment we are confronting today.”