Cricket & Pakistan

It's been almost 3 weeks now since the news about Pakistani cricketer's being involved in spot-fixing emerged in the media. Since then I started reading more and more about everything Pakistani and believe me whatever I've read has been pretty interesting, to say the least!

Pakistan as the name suggests is the "Land of Pure". Pakistan was created by partition from India on August 14th, 1947 (Indians celebrated the next day with great Joy, no wonder) gaining independence from the British rule. Since then a nation which was thought to be an ideal Muslim nation with a secular and modern out look has had its share of ups and downs, but everyone would agree in the past couple of months Pakistan has reached the lowest of the lows even by their own standard.

Pakistanis are obsessed with India so much so that any natural calamity, any human failure or anything that might hurt pride of a Pakistani is blamed on secret Indian alliances (other bad boys include the Americans and the Israelis).

Coming back to the spot fixing scandal, Salman Butt, the captain of the team never denied the allegation but just said that he would not comment till the investigations are done with and that allegations are just allegations, well if an honest man was faced with such allegations he would deny them upfront but not Salman Butt.

The first reaction across the Pakistani media was that it was a conspiracy of the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), the intelligence agency of India to defame Pakistan.

The high commissioner of Pakistan to the UK also denied any wrong doing by his country men and staunchly defended them on television.

Point here is Pakistanis cannot accept that those born in the "Land of Pure" can do anything wrong, they would ignore the fact that the evidence provided was to a common man "fool proof".

It has become the Butt of all jokes, literally. And the Butt is not that just of Salman but also of the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), the great Ijaz Butt. Ijaz Butt claims, (this of course is after the second string of allegations in less than 3 weeks of the first ones) that not his team but England took money to loose the 3rd ODI and that everything was a conspiracy against Pakistan, to isolate it in world cricket and that he is conducting his own investigations and would come out with the proofs soon. Ahem... Mr. Butt got this information from the bookies who pay the cricketers to fix the matches, no comments here.

This is not the first time Ijaz Butt has been on TV claiming outrageous things, last year after the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team and the umpires in Pakistan Butt claimed that the security cover was adequate and staunchly defended the arrangements. I guess he was not informed about the bullet that hit a player and an umpire.

All you Pakistanis out there, who may stumble upon this blog, please please please have some common sense and rational when dealing with things happening to your country if you would not like to see your self as the clown of South Asia.