The Spin

Mohammad Amir’s road to redemption The bowler will remain forever tainted as a fixer, but he has time and public opinion on his side to find a way back into cricket • Amir cleared to play domestic cricket in Pakistan Andy Bull theguardian.com, Tuesday 3 February 2015 08.35 EST Mohammad Amir has been allowed to play domestic cricket in Pakistan seven months before his five year ban was due to end. Photograph: KM Chaudary/AP AMIR’S COMEBACK How must it have felt, turning at the top of his run? Did the ball sit easy in his grip, as it always used to? Or were his muscles tight, his fingers slippy with sweat? And what was in his mind as he ran in? Was he thinking about where to put the ball, and what to do with it? Or was he wondering, perhaps, what the fielders, umpires, and batsmen were thinking? Worried, perhaps, about whether the ball would fly wildly away down the leg side? On Friday, Mohammad Amir played his first game of cricket since the Lord’s Test in 2010, and bowled his first match delivery since the one that hit Jonathan Trott’s pads and ran away for a leg bye. Earlier in that same innings, of course, he had bamboozled England’s top order, and taken four wickets in eight balls without giving away a single run. That was two days before the News of the World broke the story, and everything changed. Four years, five months, and four days later, he was back. It was a low-key match; a club game at the Lahore University of Engineering and Technology. No matter. He had been dreaming about this. The thought of it had sustained him. In an interview with Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber for their documentaryDeath of a Gentleman, Amir said: “I always think when I am in my room, laying on my bed, imagining being in the ground with ball in my hand. My eyes are closed, I am taking a runup to take a wicket on my first ball. Whatever, if the batsman is right or left, I have a plan to get inswing to get the batsman bowled. Also what I imagine is the feeling of taking a wicket on the first ball.” Amir always did have the happy knack of taking a wicket in his first over. He did it on his T20 debut, and on his Test debut too. Back then he seemed so carefree and exuberant and gifted, the youngest man in the history of Test cricket to take 50 wickets. He is only 22 now, but he looks older still. The long black locks are gone, replaced by a closer crop, there is a wisp of a beard across his once-smooth chops, and he seems, always, to have black bags under his eyes. He didn’t take a wicket in his first over this time, so far as the scanty reports say. Judging by the photographs, there weren’t many spectators there to see him, let alone journalists. We’re told that he “looked sharp and bowled well”. He took three for 27. Amir had told Collins and Kimber that he dreamed of celebrating his first wicket by pulling off his top to reveal a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Amir is back”. He chose not to do that. And if he’s wise, he never will. Amir has been allowed to return to domestic cricket seven months before his five-year ban was due to end. A reward from the ICC Board, and the Anti-Corruption and Security Unit, for his admission of guilt, his remorse, and his cooperation with their investigations. He needs to show humility and contrition now, too. This Wednesday, we’re told, he will be at the Shaukat Khanum Cancer hospital in Lahore, playing cricket with the patients, and handing out shirts and bats. There has always been a measure of sympathy for Amir – more, certainly, than was offered to either Salman Butt or Mohammad Asif. In his summing-up,Judge Mr Justice Cooke described Amir as “unsophisticated, uneducated, and impressionable”, and “readily leant on by others”. But there is some resistance, too, to his return. The High Court in Sindh has just admitted a petition from a man named Rana Faizul Hasan, which calls for the imposition of a life ban on the grounds that Amir “bought disgrace to the nation”. A poll run by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn attracted 12,000 votes, split three-quarters in favour of his return, one-quarter against. Last November Ramiz Raja wrote a piece for Cricinfo explaining why he believed that by allowing, and encouraging, Amir to make a comeback, the PCB are “shooting themselves in the foot”. Amir has the right to rehabilitation, Raja writes, just “not in the very game he sullied”. Raja’s beliefs are informed by the bitter personal experience of playing alongside team-mates who fixed matches in the mid-1990s. “It is the most awful and sickening feeling,” he wrote. “It kills your desire to play the game.” Raja’s understandable anger must be balanced against the need to allow Amir his own rehabilitation, and more pertinently still, the fact that the ICC’s Anti-Corruption and Security Unit is so underresourced that the only way they can keep a check on corruption is by encouraging guilty players to confess and cooperate so the body can better understand how the fixers work. The truth is that the best way to do that is to offer them the incentive of playing on once they have served a ban. The World Anti-Doping Agency use a similar strategy in their fight against the use of performance-enhancing drugs. It’s easy to forget now that as many as eight of Raja’s team-mates were named in the Qayyum report into fixing in 2000. One of them was Wasim Akram, a man Amir has often been compared to. Akram was found not guilty of fixing only, as Justice Qayyum wrote, because he was given “the benefit of the doubt” after another player, Ata-ur-Rehman, “changed his testimony in suspicious circumstances”. Qayyum concluded that Akram “cannot be said to be above suspicion”. Qayyum later said of his decision “I took into account his being a great cricketer. I gave him a soft punishment.” Akram is now in the ICC Hall of Fame. Another, Mushtaq Ahmed, was found not guilty of anything specifically, but Qayyum felt there was sufficient reason to cast doubt on him, and so banned him from accepting any position of future responsibility with the PCB. He is currently the team’s spin-bowling coach. He did the same job for England until last summer. In his superb new history of Pakistani cricket, The Unquiet Ones, Osman Samiuddin presents a nuanced portrait of Amir, one sketched in the shades of grey that fall between the black and white views of the issue. Both Raja and Samiuddin seem to agree that Amir is not quite the naïf that Mr Justice Cook made him seem to be. “He wasn’t a man-child as much as he was, for periods, both man and child whole, switching unknowingly maybe,” Samiuddin writes of a meeting with Amir the day after he had been banned by the ICC. “One minute he would plot his own campaign back into cricket, how his ban would be reduced … Then he would bullishly maintain he could keep fit for five years and return. And then he would despair that it is impossible for athletes to stay fit at that level and that maybe he should resume his education and give up the game forever.” Samiuddin recalls that Amir was still professing his admiration for his old skipper Butt, who would have been “a great captain, towering and confident like Imran”. One aspect of the case that does come through clearly in Samiuddin’s account is that there were people who were planning to help Amir make a comeback right from the very start. Not only the TV journalist who persuaded him to “look into the camera, to all of Pakistan, and tell them ‘you will be back, you WILL BE BACK!’” but officials within the PCB too. They held a series of private meetings with Amir in the runup to the ICC hearing “to convince him to cooperate with the anti-corruption unit and work towards a lesser punishment.” But it was only once he got to the court case proper, in England, that he came clean. Until then he had insisted he was innocent. All in all, Amir comes across as a confused young man, caught in the middle of a storm and with no sight of clear skies on the horizon. There is no doubt or confusion about the guilt of Amir. He will always be known as a man who was once a fixer. But he will have his shot at redemption. Yet it would be a mistake to think that he has already earned it simply because he is playing again. The process is really only just starting. He will have to prove himself all over again, and even then, you suspect, there will be those who will never forgive him. • Death of a Gentleman, a documentary about the state of Test cricket, is due to be released this summer. Sam and Jarrod are still looking for funding while they finish the film. Click here if you’d like to donate, or read more about the project. • The Unquiet Ones, by Osman Samiuddin, is one of the best cricket books of recent years. It has just been published in India and Pakistan, and if there is any sense in the world, it should be out in England soon. RECKONING THE RISKS Sad news from Karachi, where 18-year-old batsman Zeeshan Mohammed has died after being hit on the chest by a ball while batting in a club match. A doctor from Orangi Town General Hospital explained that Zeeshan had died of a heart seizure. “We have been told he was hit in the chest by a fast bowler while batting and collapsed on the pitch.” In the wake of the death of Phillip Hughes, The Spin asked whether such accidents were, in fact, more frequent than we tend to assume. My own perfunctory research suggests that Zeeshan’s is the eighth death at the crease in the last eight years. The difficulty is, of course, that while cricket has kept assiduous records of trivial things, no one has catalogued the fatalities. We can’t make the game safer – or even say with any confidence whether such measures need to be taken – unless we know exactly how great the risk is. Here, then, was a challenge for the authorities, and indeed for the community around the game. And I’m pleased to be able to say that one reader – Tom Gara – took it up. Tom, who lives in Australia, conducted a thorough search of the major Australian newspapers from the early 1800s up to 1956. He came up with a list of 105 deaths during that period, almost all of them caused by blows to the head and the heart. Tom found that “at least 43 senior players have died in matches between 1870 and 1956 (including two umpires and one female player).” He also found that “six players have been killed at club practice; at least four school-boys have died in junior matches; about 25 adults or children have been killed in backyard/street games; about 14 children have been killed in schoolyard games at lunchtime or after school. Seven spectators have been killed at cricket matches or at practices, including a man who came to watch his son batting in a match and was killed by a ball struck by his son. Four innocent passers-by have been killed by balls flying into nearby streets from cricket ovals or backyard games.” All this is just in Australia, up to 1956. Extrapolate the findings to include the number of deaths in the years since, and those in other countries, and we can begin to imagine that deaths in cricket, invariably described as “freak accidents”, are far more common than we think. None of which is to suggest that cricket is an especially dangerous game, or that there is a pressing need for reform. Only that it is foolish – naive at best, ignorant at worst – to make authoritative pronouncements about player safety when we have so little information about the risks. STILL WANT MORE? Zoe Williams puts Stuart Broad right, after his careless remarks about the need for people living on the minimum wage to “stay humble”. Drop Bopara? Bump Ali? Unleash Hales? Chris Stocks runs through England’s options after the Tri-Series. CONTACT THE SPIN … … by writing to andy.bull@theguardian.com.