The Akmal antidote

Last summer, the spot fixing scandal diminished my love for cricket considerably.  If bowlers were deliberately overstepping on their run-ups for cash in a Test match, just what else in cricket could be trusted anymore?  Much of the media tornado also took in Pakistan’s shocking defeat to Australia in Sydney – a defeat not so much from the jaws of victory as from it’s gullet.

Kamran Akmal was at the centre of that particular storm, accused of deliberately dropping catches to lose matches, not to mention missing straightforward run outs.  Since then however, the World Cup has proven a far more obvious, less sinister truth about Pakistan’s stumper.

He simply isn’t very good at keeping wicket.

Ian Chappell summed things up succinctly during his on-air commentary:

If his batting was as good as Don Bradman’s, he couldn’t score enough runs to make up for what he costs them with his keeping.

Fairly damning stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.  But have we ever considered that maybe it’s a good thing for cricket?  In our rush for perfection, for the elimination of mistakes, we seem to have forgotten that increasingly the human element – that ephemeral quality that gives a sport an identity and a personality – will be lost.

The DRS system might be eliminating umpiring mistakes and incorrect decisions to a large degree, but technology within the sport itself and the media that follows it also serves to highlight them.  Whereas in the past there was little choice but to give the men in white coats the benefit of the doubt, now we have Snicko, Hot-Spot, Hawkeye and so on to prove to the world their fallibility.  Then we castigate them and cast aspersions about their competence without stopping to consider how well anyone else would have dealt with a particular incident.

The same goes for the players.  Techniques and mentalities have for many years been disseminated to the point where they can be targeted by the opposition.  Prior to November, England were “carrying” Alistair Cook.  The limitations of his technique were holding him back, said the pundits who wanted him replaced by Johnny Bandwagon.  766 runs later, all of that was forgotten.

In a way, that brings us back to the spot-fixing scandal.  The ongoing World Cup has already featured murmurings of suspicious events.  Sri Lanka’s players reacted angrily to suggestions that they had been involved with a businessman who had placed a bet of $18,000 on a Pakistan victory.

This was the quote from Australian team manager Steve Bernard after suggestions that there had been something untoward in Australia’s slow start against Zimbabwe:

I’ve just heard the story a moment ago and I’m not sure how to respond, except to say it would make a cat laugh. It’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard in my life that a side can be five for nought after two overs and that that’s suspicious.

There were also murmurs about England’s tie with India, as well as the catches they dropped against Holland.  As I write this, India have lost their last 9 wickets for just 29 runs against South Africa from a position of 267/1.  Doubtless there will be similar allegations made by a reactionary media.

Match fixing has become such a problem within cricket that it is now considered the default, the standard.  It is the first reason that people look for when they attempt to explain some unusual passage of play within any important match.  We no longer consider that it could be down to the brilliance of A, or the mistakes under pressure of B, or even the incompetence of C.

The odd thing about this, is that none of the allegations I have mentioned above were directed at the team whose actions have contributed most to this situation – Pakistan.  If Ross Taylor’s late onslaught for New Zealand was the most spectacular individual performance of the World Cup so far – with a nod in the direction of Kevin O’Brien – little was made of the shocking bowling performances of Shoaib Akhtar, Abdur Rehman and Abdul Razzaq in those closing overs.

Why?  Pakistan are famous, loved even, as eccentric, inconsistent, prone to explode or implode at any moment and in equal measure.  When it happens, we don’t automatically think “match fixing”, we think “here they go again”.  We revel in the moment, the sheer sensational unpredictability of it all amidst a sport that has built itself upon predictability in recent years – cut and paste 5 day pitches, the loss of the strike bowler, Twenty20 fireworks.

Kamran Akmal’s incompetence, and that of team mates such as Shoaib, are now a protection from these allegations.  We might jokingly infer that he could never be guilty of match fixing because he’d likely catch the ones he was supposed to drop and vice-versa.

We still celebrate this within club cricket – the lumbering, 16 stone taxi driver who bowls medium pace; the 65 year old who turns out week after week for his 2 not out batting at number eleven; the gangling youngster who bowls at 2nd slip more than at the batsman – where the lure of prize money and TV’s interference haven’t stolen away the innocence of the game.

If cricket is to be salvaged from the grip of illegal bookmakers and TV edited perfection, it is vital that we remember the importance of human error.  It has, after all, provided many of the great moments in cricket’s history.  Without England’s poor batting, would Botham’s heroics at Headingley in 1981 ever have happened?  Imagine if Herschelle Gibbs hadn’t “dropped the World Cup” in 1999.

Sometimes, those moments of error, incompetence and downright farce should be treasured.

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