The Newest Spot Fixing Scandal: The Final Nail in Cricket’s Coffin
As another spot fixing scandal emerges in the 3rd ODI between England and Pakistan, it seems as if the sport of cricket is on its last breath. Just how many more illegal affairs and controversies will have to emerge before the governing bodies take control of the situation? It has been a dark few weeks for the Pakistani cricket team and due to these allegations, true or false they may be; the entire series against England has been overshadowed. Will Pakistani cricket ever be able to recover from these allegations and will anyone want to play against the team in the future? These are questions that will only be answered after a full investigation is conducted into what happened during this series and the truth is uncovered.
The latest spot fixing allegations relate to the 3rd ODI played between England and Pakistan recently. The Sun Newspaper in England reportedly got a tip off from a source that claimed to know the exact number of runs that Pakistan were going to make in a particular stretch of overs in the game. Because this information was given to the newspaper before the match took place there were a lot of people watching the match very closely. Unfortunately for the Pakistanis, the pre match prediction of runs collaborated very closely with the score made at certain times during the match. In particular the allegations centred around the 39th and 40th overs of the match when Pakistan were batting. The problem for the visitors was that during these two overs, they only managed to score seven runs, having scored 58 runs in the last few overs. When these two overs were checked with the information received before the match it revealed the same score. Cricket seems to have died a little bit more with this latest scandal.
Spot fixing is a huge menace in the game at the moment. It is very hard to detect and it is very illegal because it puts the whole game into disrepute. If players or a whole team can be bought to fix one over of batting or a couple of no-balls or even wides, then they can be bought to do anything and fans are never sure whether they are watching a proper competition or a fixed match with the outcome already known. The Pakistani team has been vehemently denying this latest string of allegations and the captain http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Shahid-Afridi-c2482 has been strongly denying that anything dodgy took place in the match. But at the moment with all the allegations flying around it is hard to know who is telling the truth and who is lying. If it is proven that this latest scandal of spot fixing did take place, then that will mean that others on the Pakistani team were in sync with match fixers and corrupt bookies. Maybe even some players on the England team were in on the deal as well but we cannot assume anything at the moment until the matter is fully investigated. What is very strange is the fact that if these allegations do turn out to be true, the players involved were not very smart about it all. They should have known that an investigation was already on and anti-corruption agencies were watching this match every closely so maybe they should have paused their spot fixing for a bit and started in the next series again.
What we can say is the fact that all these allegations and scandals in cricket have plunged the whole game into a very dark place where it may never recover from. Fans might leave the game in droves and start watching some other sport that has less chances of being fixed. Diehard cricket fans are slowly turning away from the game and every scandal plunges them into despair once again. The ICC really needs to get its act together and fix the game that is under its control. They have been slow to react to match fixing over the years and it is showing in the recent problems afflicting the game. The http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Pakistan-c755 Cricket Board has been sleeping as well and it is time for it to wake up and start punishing some players and fixing the whole system of cricket in the country.
Hopefully cricket can survive this latest round of allegations and come out unscathed. It is highly unlikely because the sport as a whole has been tainted in the process and may not even be able to survive. Some huge changes might be on the cards to revolutionize the whole game, if they are not done, then we should probably bury the game now and be done with it.
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