One word; perspective!

This week saw the start of the next stage in Pakistan's ritual humiliation at the hands of England and the ICC. Forced to play two International Twenty20s and five One Day Internationals their players, already physically tired after seven tests in 10 weeks, and surely mentally jaded from the constant suspicion surrounding their comrades, the team have produced what can only be described as inept displays. They lost both Twenty20s in poor fashion, producing only slightly better in 50 over game at Chester-Le-Street (I refuse to call it the Durham Emirates International Cricket Ground!)
In the process England recorded their record seventh straight limited overs victory, a fine achievement. But let's remove the rose-tinted Oakleys and look at the results objectively. We are World Twenty20 champions, so we should have beaten Pakistan seeing as we beat them in the Super 8 stages of the competition in the Caribbean, and combine with that the troubles that the team has both internally and the worry for their relatives at home, the performances begin to take a lightly different gloss.
Don't misunderstand me. Too quickly in this country we jump on the back of our national sides when things go wrong, myself included, but we still have a long way to go before we can consider ourselves worthy of beating Australia on their patch.
As far as Pakistan are concerned things are looking slightly less rosy. Their captain and two premier fast-bowlers have returned home under somewhat of a cloud, lambasted by their countrymen for letting their people down in a time of great crisis. But let's be honest. The last thing I would be feeling if I was a victim of severe flooding would be disappointment at Jimmy Anderson taking a bung to bowl a couple of no-balls.
And that's all it was, a couple of no-balls. Mohammad Amir is a huge talent that needs to be nurtured so that he can carry on doing to everybody else what he did to England in that fateful day at Lords. He showed why he so highly rated in international cricket by bowling of the best spells that Old Father Time will have ever witnessed. But in a split second the winds changed and there was talk of him being banned from cricket for life. The sport that saved him from a life of poverty and deprivation. He has already overcome dengue fever to be where he is now, and to deprive such a talent of fulfilling his potential because he was exploited would be a far greater loss.
Asif and Salman Butt are another matter. Let's start with Asif. This is not the first, and dare I say it won't be the last, time that he has been on the ICC's radar. IN 2006 he was suspended, along with Shoaib Akhtar, for taking performance enhancing drug Nandrolone. Both men were later acquitted, blaming a lack of knowledge in Asia about protein powders and vitamins for their indiscretion.
Salman Butt took on the captaincy after Shahid Afridi stood down, and received a glowing reference from the man he replaced.
"Salman is showing his maturity. He's good enough to take over this team as captain."
Well that may be so, but it seems he may have used his new-found responsibility in the wrong way. Should these three men be dealt the same cruel blow? Should they all be tarred with the same sticky brush? Because let's face it, something like this will never leave you alone.
If it is proven that they bowled deliberate no-balls then yes, a ban is necessary, but so is support and help to ensure it doesn't happen again. If the uglier spectre of match-fixing materialises then we have a bigger tragedy, and life-bans may be more appropriate. But let's look at the bigger picture. It was three runs. Three runs that made no difference to the outcome of that game.
Cricket has suffered a mini-crisis, but surely a bigger one would be to lose a talent like Amir because he didn't receive the support he needed, and we all got a horrible case of tunnel-vision. Cricket is not dead or decaying, let's face it, until one of the players fakes an injury or sleeps with a prostitute, it will always be in third place on the tabloid league.