Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Aamir faced another setback as they have been sacked by their employer National Bank of Pakistan (NBP), which is one of the best teams in domestic cricket. On the 5th of this month, The International Cricket
Council’s (ICC) three men tribunal headed by Michael Beloff QC banned the trio for ten, seven and five years respectively after the spot-fixing charges were proved against these players.
English tabloid News of the World broke the story back in August 2010 that Mohammad Aamir and Mohammad Asif bowled deliberate no-balls against England in the Lords Test and were influenced by Salman Butt, who was the captain of the Test team at that stage.
The trio was initially suspended by ICC immediately after the incident occurred and the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) also terminated the central contracts with these players but NBP still persisted with their contracts until the charges were proven and the
players were declared as convicts.
All the three players represent the same department in national cricket and have played a big part in the NBP’s success in domestic cricket for a number of years. However, their absence does not seem to have hurt NBP’s progress which ended up as runner ups
in the recently concluded Faysal Bank National One Day Tournament 2010-11 Division One. Former Test cricketer and left arm spinner Iqbal Qasim who is also a senior official in the sports department of NBP said that, "we waited until the ICC tribunal gave its
decision and then released them from our employment."
National Bank of Pakistan has a rich history of sports in Pakistan and many international players of all sports are employed by the bank in order to promote sports in the country. NBP’s cricket team is also a star studded one as the likes of Kamran Akmal,
Fawad Alam, Nasir Jamshed, Umar Amin and Qaiser Abbas represent the bank in the domestic cricket of http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Pakistan-c755.
This is a huge shock for the banned trio as all of them had lucrative contracts with NBP and this has been their only source of income once they were deprived of playing both international and domestic cricket.
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