Sachin sees no evil, Sri Lankans sense a storm

Speaking to NDTV the other day, Sachin Tendulkar said the following:

"In my 21 years of international cricket, I have never heard of any Indian player being approached by bookies."

Really? I guess Sachin can't have played more than a handful of matches with Ajay Sharma, so perhaps the latter's easy to forget. However, Sachin played 131 international matches with Manoj Prabhakar, 191 with Ajay Jadeja and a whopping 292 with Mohammad Azharuddin. He amassed more caps, runs, centuries, catches and wickets under Azhar than he has under any other captain before or since, and it's not as if Azhar's admission of guilt and subsequent life ban happened behind close doors.

"See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil," the saying goes. Sachin may do no evil, on account of which he gets plenty of richly deserved praise, but his recent statement does make me wonder about the whole see no monkey, hear no monkey, speak no monkey episode...

Hang on a minute there, Shane...

Mr I-never-knew-he-was-a-bookmaker-and-my-mum-gave-me-the-drugs somehow had the nerve to say this yesterday:

"They should be thrown out, simple as that. I don't think there is any other way to do it.  If they have been involved in throwing games, they should be banned for life ... anybody who is involved should be thrown out."

Personally, I would have thought that anybody who has accepted money from a bookmaker in exchange for information and only been fined in secret for it (before lying repeatedly on prime-time TV* in claiming that he had stopped speaking to said bookmaker upon becoming aware of his profession)... or who has tested positive for a masking agent for anabolic steroids immediately after making a rapid recovery from a shoulder injury (in time to play in a World Cup which he had announced would be his last ODI tournament) and only been sentenced to half the "mandatory" two-year ban for taking such a diuretic (before being allowed to play charity matches and do television commentary during said ban, much to WADA chief Dick Pound's dismay**)... should not rush to pass judgement.

What now for Mohammad Amir?

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94.

Since the turn of the millenium, no young cricketer has excited me more than Mohammad Amir. As a Sri Lankan supporter, I found Ajantha Mendis' emergence pretty thrilling but there was always the nagging worry that he would not be as effective once the mystery wore off, as has indeed proved to be the case. I've had no such worry about Amir, however, as his success has been due not to mystery but rather a precocious mastery of the fast bowler's art.

His 6-for last Friday made him - at age 18 - the youngest cricketer to earn an entry on the Honours Boards at Lord's. A week earlier at the Oval, he had become the youngest person to take a Test 5-for in England. In fact, he was also the youngest fast bowler to take a Test 5-for anywhere in the world when he ripped through the Aussie middle order last December in Melbourne.

Cricinfo published a blog post of mine about Amir in January. In it I tried to describe how uplifting I'd found it to watch him in action in both that MCG spell and the World T20 Final in 2009. As such, the most heartbreaking aspect of the spot-fixing scandal that has just hit the news is the fact that Amir is implicated in it. Kamran Akmal has already gained a reputation as a bit of an agitator in the Pakistan dressing room and Mr "A Class" Asif has hardly steered clear of controversy. Salman Butt's reputation as a leader has been growing until now but it is Amir who has undoubtedly been the star of what appeared to be a promising young Pakistan team.