LONDON: Salman Butt faces the end of his international career after bearing the brunt of the blame for the corruption scandal which has resulted in minimum five-year bans for the former Pakistan test captain and two team mates.
An International Cricket Council (ICC) tribunal banned Butt for 10 years on Saturday, five of which will be suspended if he does not offend again and takes part in the Pakistan Cricket Board's anti-corruption campaign.
Butt and his opening bowlers Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir were found guilty of arranging for deliberate no-balls to be delivered in the fourth test against England last August.
Asif was banned for seven years, with two suspended, while teenager Amir was handed a straight five-year ban.
Butt, who led his country to test victories over England Australia in his brief tenure as his country's leader last year, will be 31 in five years' time and is unlikely to play test cricket again.
There also appears to be no way back for his senior pace bowler Asif, who is two years older than Butt and who has been in trouble with the authorities before after testing positive twice for a steroid and getting caught with a recreational drug in his wallet at Dubai airport.
Amir, who bowled brilliantly at Lord's, is only 18 but five years is still a long time in any athlete's life and especially so in a player's formative years.
Amir told a private new channel in Pakistan that he would continue to train and keep himself fit.
“The ban does not say I can't train or play privately,” he said.
However, no player is indispensable and Pakistan, despite their current security and corruption problems, have a deep pool of reserve talent as they demonstrated in winning test and one-day series in New Zealand this year.
LITTLE RECOURSE
Five years was the minimum ban the ICC could have imposed under its anti-corruption code after the tribunal concluded the trio were guilty of spot-fixing, the offence of deliberately manipulating individual events within a match.
London sports lawyer Adam Morallee said it was difficult to see what recourse the three Pakistanis now had, especially as they had not been supported by their national board.
The trio, who deny any wrongdoing, have a right of appeal to the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.
“They could appeal at the length of the sentences but the bans are at the lower end of the scale,” Morallee, a partner in the law firm Mishcon de Reya, told Reuters.
The three-man tribunal, headed by British lawyer Michael Beloff, said it was up to the ICC to decide if the full decision should be released.
“It is our strong and unanimous view that it is in the interests of all concerned in the world of cricket that publication should take place as soon as possible,” Beloff said.
The spot-fixing scandal came 10 years after a match-fixing furore resulted in life bans for three test captains.
Spot-fixing involves a player, or players, agreeing to perform to order by prearrangement. For example, a bowler might deliberately bowl consecutive wides in his second over or a batsman could make sure he does not reach double figures.
Because individual spot-fixing incidents may have no influence on a game's outcome, they are particularly difficult to detect and the Lord's offences came to the authorities' attention only after a sting operation in the British newspaper The News of the World.
As a result of a separate investigation, Britain's Crown Prosecution Service charged the Pakistan trio and 35-year-old sports agent Mazhar Majeed from Croydon, England, on Friday with conspiracy to obtain and accept corrupt payments and with conspiracy to cheat.