A day after Salman Butt and Mohammed Asif were convicted for spot—fixing, former England skipper Michael Vaughan suspects that a Test match against Pakistan in 2000 might have been fixed.
Vaughan said Pakistan had surrendered from a strong position, and now he is forced to think if the home players played genuinely, and even at that time the same thought crossed their minds.
“I now look back on matches I played in and wonder if strings were being pulled behind the scenes. For instance, go back to the Test we won against Pakistan in Karachi in December 2000.
“They collapsed from a strong position to leave us a small total to chase, which we did as night descended. It was a very surreal atmosphere and I remember feeling that there was something not right about it at the time. Was it just a dodgy wicket or were there other forces at play?,” Vaughan wrote in his column for ‘Daily Telegraph’
“You find yourself remembering odd incidents in other matches - moments when batsmen have run themselves out first ball or triggered collapses with ridiculous shots.”
Vaughan said not only the no—balls at Lord’s Test in 2010, but other instances could have been influenced.
“.... but the temptation now is to go back and question everything in the light of what happened at Lord’s last year.
Stuart Broad scored 169 in that Test match, but I wonder, after everything that has happened, how confident he is that his opponents were giving their all,” he wrote.
Vaughan said despite the culprits being brought to justice with the conviction of Butt and Asif, it would not possible to eradicate the menace once and all.
“You will have lost your mind if you contemplate fixing cricket in England in the future, but it is wishful thinking to believe it will eradicate the problem from all aspects of our sport around the world,” he wrote.
Vaughan said the amount of cricket being played these days is the biggest hindrance in keeping a regular watch over all the games.
“.... there are so many games played all over the world and shown live on television these days — Tests, one—dayers, county matches, IPL — it is an impossible patch for the International Cricket Council to police. There are just too many games to keep an eye on,” he said.
