Cricket and the lure of money – a sad tale with a long history

The allegations of spot-fixing made against Pakistan are the latest in a long line of incidents where the pernicious influence of money has damaged the game

The late Hansie Cronje, the former South African captain, was found guilty in 2000 of fixing matches. Photograph: Martyn Hayhow/AFP/Getty Images

Cricket was never a wholly clean game. Whatever we like to imagine, it has seldom been entirely free from the dangerous lure of money, whether it was gentlemen wagering on the outcome of matches during the gambling boom of the 18th century, WG Grace and his brother Edward fiddling the takings at Gloucestershire in the Victorian era, or Graham Gooch and Mike Gatting accepting wads of particularly filthy cash to lead tours to South Africa during the time of apartheid. But the alleged incidents of spot-fixing revealed by today's story in the News of the World will damage the sport's integrity as surely as if someone had detonated massive charges of high explosive under its foundations.

You would like to smack the idiots who allegedly accepted money to influence events in the fourth Test at Lord's, thus dealing a blow to the dreams of young boys and girls who grow up admiring the heroes of the game and aspiring to emulate their achievements. The fact that one of the current crop of apparent miscreants is a teenage bowler of great virtuosity in one of cricket's most arcane and appealing skills – that of swing bowling – makes it all the sadder, since he is just the sort of figure to inspire even younger people, in his homeland and elsewhere, to take up a game constantly under threat of obsolescence.

The case of the late Hansie Cronje, the former South African captain found guilty in 2000 of fixing matches, was one thing. Cronje may have been taken for a role model in his country, but he was a mature man and cricketer entering the final years of his career. He was deserving of no sympathy or regret, merely contempt for his venality and hypocrisy. At 18, Mohammad Amir is at the other end of his career and has it in him to become one of the greatest players in his country's history, as he showed with that mesmerising passage of play in which he captured four English wickets for no runs on Friday morning. If this case is proved, however, and it is hard to see how it can be defended in the light of the evidence presented today, his reputation will never be the same.

There will be regrets, too, about the role of Salman Butt, his 25-year-old captain, who made such a marvellous showing on his first Test appearance against England in Multan five years ago, contributing knocks of 74 and 122 to a thrilling victory by 22 runs, under the leadership of Inzamam‑ul‑Haq. But it is difficult to see how the preordained bowling of no-balls can take place without the connivance of a captain willing to adjust his bowlers' schedule to fit the plan.

And this scandal is, of course, the last thing Pakistan needed, whatever perspective is taken, from the narrow interests of a mere game to the plight of the millions left homeless by a natural disaster. Unable to play Test matches at home due to security issues, and with their gifted players prevented by the same considerations from joining the scramble for the millions available from the Indian Premier League and forced to watch others reap the rewards now available at the pinnacle of the game, they are perhaps uniquely vulnerable to such temptations.

This is a world, moreover, which is approaching that of 18th‑century England in its obsession with gambling, which assumes its most pernicious form when money is staked on failure. At one end of the scale lies George Soros's notorious $1bn winning bet on the collapse of sterling in 1992, while at the other lies Mohammad Amir's foot landing a few inches beyond the batting crease, just far enough to persuade the umpire to declare a no-ball and perhaps to net the culprit a few thousands pounds. In between lie the worlds of junk bonds, short-selling and spread betting, with bookmakers' logos on the front of the shirts of Premier League footballers and the pernicious Skybet slogan broadcast daily into British homes: "It matters more when there's money on it."

What we must do, as things stand, is congratulate the News of the World – owned, of course, by the mastermind of Sky – on this particular piece of journalism. The newspaper's successful efforts to expose the personal peccadilloes of such as Max Mosley and John Terry are hard to applaud, given their tenuous connection with any conceivable public interest, but when the same team brings its well-resourced ingenuity to bear on a subject such as fixing sporting events for gain, the result is of legitimate benefit to society. And, of course, to sport, which continues to develop its insatiable appetite for money from all sources to the point of helpless addiction while coming under ever increasing pressure to ensure that the public can believe what it sees.