Its particular evil, as the recent one-day cricket series between Pakistan and England demonstrated, is to fracture the unwritten contract between athlete and spectator. Sport loses all meaning if it is not played within an agreed set of rules.
Distrust and rancour, including open hostility between the teams, accompanied the Pakistanis throughout their seven one-day matches against England, culminating in a clash between England batsman Jonathan Trott and Pakistan fast bowler Wahab Riaz in the nets at Lord's.
The bad feeling followed the suspensions of Pakistan test captain Salman Butt and his two leading pace bowlers Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif after newspaper reports that they arranged for no-balls to be deliberately bowled in the fourth test against England at Lord's last month.
The trio have maintained that they are innocent of spot-fixing, an offence which carries a maximum life ban. They and Riaz have also been questioned by police.
Spot-fixing, or manipulating individual incidents within a match for financial gain, may not necessarily alter the outcome of a match. But it is an insidious disease which, when detected, creates a poisonous atmosphere of suspicion and distrust.
Although athletics remains the central sport of the summer Olympics, it has suffered a probably irreversible slump in popularity outside its European strongholds after a series of doping scandals showed spectators could not believe what they were seeing.
Its supporters could at least argue that track and field athletes take banned drugs to enhance their performances, unlike corrupt cricketers who cheat fans by taking money to deliberately under-perform.
The 2000 match-fixing furore, after which international captains Hansie Cronje (South Africa), Salim Malik (Pakistan) and Mohammad Azharuddin (India) were banned for life led to a rash of ill-informed articles about the besmirching of a noble game.
LORD'S BOOKMAKERS
In fact the game was partly founded in gambling, as noted by cricket historian Rowland Bowen, whose 1970 book “Cricket. A History of its Growth and Development” is a masterly riposte to some of the more sentimental nonsense peddled about the game's inherent moral superiority over other sports.
“There have been always been different kinds of gambling in the game,” Bowen wrote.
“The harm came when individuals started backing themselves or their teams or when others started 'selling' matches.
“Some attempt was made to suppress the evil, at Lord's, in the early 1820s but it cannot have been successful or permanent, for bookmakers were still at Lord's 50 and 60 years later and of course almost to the end of that time players were accused of selling matches.”
Former Pakistan captain Rashid Latif, who gave evidence to the Pakistan judicial inquiry into match-fixing first convened in 1998, said match-rigging had to be viewed in the wider context of acknowledged malpractices in, for example, horse racing and soccer.
“To me, it (match-fixing) started from horse racing, where the jockey controls the horse,” Latif said in an emailed response to questions from Reuters.
“Coming back to cricket the increasing number of Twenty20 matches has in fact raised the amount of doubts and I feel the situation has got worse from that of the 1990s.”
Latif, who has accepted a role as coach of Afghanistan after criticising the Pakistan Cricket Board's (PCB) handling of the spot-fixing scandal, said part of the problem was that no player could be sure of his place in international cricket.
“Look, every sportsman wants to secure his future as no one can guarantee that he would be kept in the team for a certain period therefore when he is offered a sum of money which would be equivalent to accumulated earnings of the next five years then naturally he would get attracted to the offer,” he said.
“If a player is selfish, he would be easily trapped. And in view of my own experience a top player is more selfish then an ordinary one.”
CONDON COMMENTS
Before the latest crisis erupted, the outgoing head of the International Cricket Council's (ICC) Anti-Corruption and Security Unit, Paul Condon, made some prescient comments before handing over to another former policeman in Ronnie Flannagan.
“The challenge for the game is to stop that small minority of bad players, and it is a tiny, tiny minority, from being induced into doing these spot fixes,” Condon told reporters.
“My prediction is that you will never totally eradicate that from the game. If you were designing a game to fix you would design cricket because it is a whole series of discrete events, every ball you can bet on. So there will always be that temptation.
“If we get complacent, fixing will be all over it like a rash in a year, two years, so we need to keep the pressure on.
We are in good shape but sadly from time to time you are going to hear, hopefully, individuals but maybe teams who let world cricket down."
Pakistan's troubled tour of Britain finally ended on Wednesday night with Butt, Amir and Asif already back home after agreeing to return to Britain if required to help with a police investigation. They have also filed replies to the ICC's charges.
Until the case is concluded one way or the other it is impossible to judge the possible fallout. But an indication of sponsor unease came with the news that the official kit suppliers to the PCB were reviewing their contract and suspending their commercial relationship with Amir.
"Like everyone else in the cricket world, we are truly saddened and shocked by these match-fixing allegations. I sincerely hope they are not true," said BoomBoom managing director Ali Ehsan.
"(However) we cannot allow our brand to be associated with any whiff of corruption or suspicion of foul play."
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