Anyone interested in sport this summer will have noticed that cricket became a byword for anything other than a game being played with a bat and ball. Twittergate already threatened to engulf the sport as the ECB mistakenly gave Kevin Pietersen a computer and showed him how to use it. They thought he was just using it to buy a new pair of diamond earrings. How wrong they were. The real scandal was a lot more sinister than this though.
Match fixing allegations filled the pages of every tabloid newspaper with a passing interest and threatened to cancel Pakistan’s tour of England. The sad news is the saga is still rolling on.
Pakistani wicketkeeper Zulqarnain Haider has fled his team’s hotel in Dubai and is heading for the UK after receiving death threats from match fixers. It has even forced the 24-year-old to retire from international cricket.
His crime?
Haider explains: “I did not do what I was asked to do in the fourth one-dayer and I also did not let it happen what was being asked to do, so this is the reason that I left it and came here and I did what I felt [was] better,”
The fact that this is still rife in the cricket world is very worrying, especially on the eve of the Ashes series. Although neither of those two sides have ever been implicated, this saga paints a sorry picture for the world of cricket.
