When I heard that the three Pakistani cricketers involved in the betting scandal had received custodial sentences I was shocked and actually thought that whoever it was told me must have been mistaken. Then when it was confirmed that all three had indeed been given prison sentences, I felt a shiver of indignation as disbelief was swiftly replaced by a sense of shock.
My immediate thoughts went to the youngest of the trio, Mohammad Amir who was was only 18 when the "crime" was committed and is now facing time in Feltham young offenders institution, which by all accounts is one of the harshest and most brutal of all UK penitentiaries. Surely anyone with any sense will feel this judgement is disproportionate to the offence. Amir is a teenager playing in a foreign country and has probably been encouraged by Salman Butt the captain of the team and another senior player, Mohammad Asif, to become involved in bowling deliberate no-balls.
How many of us, as teenagers, did things we knew were wrong but still went ahead and did them under peer pressure? If your answer to that question is "Not Me" I suggest you are a liar. But this was not peer pressure this was coming from on high, from the man who was issuing orders to all the players, both experienced and inexperienced. And for this, Amir is going to be incarcerated in a place which a BBC Panorama investigation described as "At Feltham in the last year there has been a murder, a teenager has hanged himself, and there have been numerous attempted hangings. Steve Bradshaw reports on the conditions that have created a culture of violence and self-harm at the notorious prison for young offenders."
Then I started to consider what these cricketers had actually done wrong and from the judge's summing-up it suddenly became clear that this was a case much more worrying in its severity and cack-handedness than I initially thought. To quote the judge's summing up "'It's not cricket' was an adage. It is the insidious effect of your actions on professional cricket and the followers of it that make the offences so serious."
More serious than criminal assault or fraud?
The summing up continues "The image and integrity of what was once a game but is now a business is damaged in the eyes of all, including the many youngsters who regarded you as heroes and would have given their eye teeth to play at the levels and with the skills that you had."
This is the most revealing statement, as the judge reveals the rationale behind these harsh sentences is that the age of innocence has been lost and cricket has become a business. Poppycock. The next time this judge is at Lords enjoying his lunch and hospitality, maybe he can spare a thought for the young men who are suffering the degradation and long-term damage of prison life. All this was revealed by that scion of moral fortitude The News of the World. Irony anyone?
Finally just consider the outrage if this had happened in Pakistan and three English cricketers had been found guilty of match-fixing and had consequently been imprisoned in Pakistan.
