Pakistan's shame

It is the most shameful moment in the history of cricket. Shame on Pakistan. Here is the video depicting the shameful event. The greed with which the guy gets the wads of currency from the 'dealer' is disgusting. Pakistan cricket team should be banned from playing.

And this has happened in the blessed month of Ramazan! Look at the eyes of the guy. They are full of greed. Look at his stretched hands. Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh) said: "The upper hand is better than the lower hand" This man has lowered his hand with ulterior motives.

Betting, gambling and speculation are banned in Islam. How come betting and gambling thrives in Muslim societies? It is very sad. It is very bad. It is madness.

It is not exclusive to Pakistan alone. Indians too have been involved in spot fixing and match fixing for many many decades.India’s greatest cricket writer, Prem Panicker, managing editor of Yahoo! India, says that spot-fixing, like match-fixing, isn’t quite a 21st century phenomenon but a 20th century one. He writes in his blog:

There was once an opening batsman known as much for his impeccable technique as for his preternatural sense of the ebbs and flows, the rhythms, of Test cricket. The way he constructed an innings was both masterclass and template: the early watchfulness, the constant use of the well placed single to get away from strike and go to the other end, from where he could observe the behavior of pitch and bowler, the imperceptible change of gears and then, as the lunch interval loomed, the gradual down-shifting of gears as commentators marveled: ‘He is pulling down the shutters… he knows it is important not to give away his wicket just before the break… the onus is on him to return after the break and build his innings all over again… the man is a master of focus…’

I followed along, on radio first and later, on television, and I marveled along with the commentators, the experts. And then, years later, I heard a story — of how, when the toss went the way of his team and this opener went out to bat on the first day of a Test, a close relative would bet with not one, but several, bookies, about whether the batsman would get to 50 before lunch. Or not. ‘So he would get to 45 or so, and there would be 20 minutes to go before lunch, and he would defend like hell, and all these experts would talk about how he is downing shutters for lunch when the fact was, there was a lot of money riding on his not getting 50 before the break,’ is a paraphrase of what one of the bookies who suffered from such well-placed bets said.

That is just one story, of the dozens that come your way once you become a journalist, and gain entree into the Kabuki world of cricket.

 More Here.