Game for Anything by Gideon Haigh

Author:Gideon Haigh [Haigh, Gideon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781310052
Publisher: MBI

The Qayyum Inquiry

The Incredible Exploding Cricket Team

MEET THE INCREDIBLE EXPLODING CRICKET TEAM: the batting, bowling and bookmaking Pakistan machine. Where players can be reprimanded for taking wickets and making catches, where bookies walk into hotel rooms with underpants full of banknotes, and where affidavits are signed as routinely as souvenir bats.

By now, you’ll have heard of Justice Malik Muhammed Qayyum’s report, recommending life bans on former captain Salim Malik and pace bowler Ata-ur-Rehman, and also fines for Wasim Akram, Mushtaq Ahmed, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Saeed Anwar, Waqar Younis and Akram Raza. But there’s more. The compendious witness statements collected by the Lahore High Court provide a vivid picture of a team that’s introduced many new techniques to cricket’s textbook: notably the finger point, backside cover, sideways glance and face save. ‘Is waqt sab ko sab par shaq ho raha hai,’ mutters Saeed Anwar on one of the taped telephone conversations which wicket-keeper Rashid Latif presented to Qayyum: ‘At this moment everyone is suspecting everybody else.’ For when someone in Pakistan mentions suspect actions, they’re not thinking of Law 24.

‘We have to lose the match’

Pakistani cricket in disarray. Wasim Akram booted out as captain. Team-mates accusing one another of treachery. They could be headlines from today, but they were also the headlines in January 1994 when Pakistan’s president Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari dissolved his country’s cricket board and appointed an ad hoc committee: chairman Javed Burki, Arif Ali Abbasi and Zafar Altaf. Abbasi testified before Qayyum that he persuaded his colleagues to crown Javed Miandad skipper for a forthcoming three-Test tour of New Zealand: ‘However, next morning I was overruled and Salim Malik was made the captain.’ So it was that one crisis begat another: if the inquiry’s evidence is to be trusted, this overnight change-of-mind was the worst miscasting since Arnold Schwarzenegger made Kindergarten Cop.

The new reign dawned promisingly: Pakistan won the first two Tests easily. Then, however, they dropped the last, permitting New Zealand to overhaul 324 in the fourth innings. And the day before the last of five one-day matches in the BNZ Series – which Pakistan had already won – some peculiar things started to happen.

According to opener Aamir Sohail, team manager Majid Khan received information that the next day’s game in Christchurch would be lost: ‘Consequently he had banned all the telephonic calls to the players and informed them that henceforth all the telephonic calls would be routed to him.’ But a ‘telephonic call’ got through to Rashid Latif all right. He testified that it was a summons to Malik’s room where – in the presence of Waqar Younis, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Akram Raza and Basit Ali – the skipper offered him Rs 10 lakh (‘lakh’ means 100,000) to play badly. ‘I told him that I would think over the matter,’ swore Latif. ‘In the next morning during the play when I took a catch of a batsman from New Zealand, Salim Malik came to me and reprimanded me and reiterated that we have to lose the match. During the

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