A good day for cricket - thanks to News of the World

TWO former Pakistani cricketers, Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif, face jail terms after being found guilty of spot-fixing in a match against England in 2010. The pair and a third player, Mohammad Amir, who pleaded guilty, have been convicted of cheating after deliberately plotting to bowl no-balls during the game at Lords. They were trapped by a News of the World sting.
 
Their convictions at Southwark Crown court yesterday came on what Michael Atherton in The Times called a "wretched day". But he added that it was "a good one for sport given the message it sends, and a good one for cricket’s administrators".

It had to happen
"Nobody wants to see two cricketers on the verge of going to jail, but this was very much a day cricket needed," says Nasser Hussain in the Daily Mail.
 
His successor as England captain, Michael Vaughan, agrees and says the verdict should safeguard the game in this country.  "You will have lost your mind if you contemplate fixing cricket in England in the future," he writes in The Daily Telegraph. "But it is wishful thinking to believe it will eradicate the problem from all aspects of our sport around the world."
 
So, can corruption be stamped out?
Vaughan is not sure. "The one thing that has become apparent is that cricket is a very easy game to manipulate if you want to make money from fixing. There are so many scenarios within a game that can be influenced and go undetected. In that sense it is almost unique in sport."
 
And legal sanctions alone will not end the practice says Matthew Syed in The Times. "Detection and punishment, while important, are secondary issues in the battle to salvage the integrity of sport," he writes. "Peer pressure exercises a deeper and altogether more subtle influence."
 
Pakistan and the ICC must take their share of the blame
"Corruption in cricket is an extension of the failures of Pakistani society," writes Kamran Abbasi on Cricinfo. "The Pakistan Cricket Board is a failed institution that has declined to address the evident issues of corruption among its cricketers. The ICC has failed in its duty to protect international cricket from bookies and match-fixers. They have both missed opportunities to pursue leads and intervene."
 
But the News of the World deserves praise
It was the defunct tabloid that blew the lid on the scandal, and Owen Gibson of The Guardian pays tribute to the paper. "The News of the World was arguably the only organisation with the means and the modus operandi to snare the perpetrators of a fix of the type that had long been suspected but never proved," he writes.
 
And there is a lesson for other sports too. He says: "It is also notable that it is the media that has made the running in investigating the corruption at the heart of Fifa."
 
More praise is heaped upon the NotW by Saad Shafqat on Cricinfo. "Sometimes you have to chop off a gangrenous limb to save a life," he says.
 
"Just as the salvaged patient and his family need to be grateful to the surgeon who performs the amputation, Pakistan cricket and those who love it owe a debt of gratitude to the News of the World and its clever investigative team. Were it not for this now-defunct tabloid's brilliant sting, we would still be in denial." ·