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He is one of the finest fast bowlers the world has seen and arguably the greatest cricketer to emerge from New Zealand. His spell of 9 for 52 that decimated Australia in Brisbane 25 years ago is a part of cricketing legend. Yet none of them seems enough for New Zealand Cricket; according to a report in One News, not only is Hadlee’s Brisbane performance not being honoured at NZC’s annual cricket awards ceremony, he hasn’t even been invited to the event. When asked about this glaring omission, Justin Vaughan,…

WITH the latest issue of the ‘News of the World’ on the newsstand, Pakistani cricket is once again under the radar. Readers all over the world were treated to an exclusive interview of cricketer Yasir Hameed.

In the Guardian, Roy Greenslade explains why he thinks the News of the World sting which led to the breaking of the spot-fixing controversy was justified. Was there a genuine public interest in exposing (alleged) sporting corruption? I like sport and I like cricket. I support Essex and England. I understand the desire to win and the passion it arouses in both players and spectators. Sport is meaningless if it is fixed because it is, at its heart, all about competition. Otherwise, there is no point to it. People who…

Stuart Broad believes that the same professionalism that helped England to victory in the World Twenty20 in the Caribbean back in May has enabled them to keep their focus amid a torrid week

Yasir Hameed, the Pakistan batsman, has told the News of the World that he was asked by a bookmaker to help fix a Test for £100,000 but turned down the money … but did not inform the ICC

Cricket has drawn Pakistani society together but now shows apparently disparate elements are more similar than people think, writes Osman Samiuddin for the Observer. Cricketers have come from places much smaller than Asif and Amir, from poorer backgrounds, and gone through entire lives – let alone a career – without a scandal to stain them. Pakistan’s players do not get paid as much as counterparts around the world, it is being said. This is true. They have also missed out on the life-changing riches of the Indian Premier League. But…

The News of the World sting has turned the cricketing world upside down and made match fixing topic du jour once again. In Open magazine, Aniruddha Bahal, goes inside the tabloid’s undercover operation and breaks it down, meeting by meeting. The setting was a classic undercover strategy, specially where an impression needed to be conveyed of opulence and power. In this case, the NOTW team pretended to be members of a betting syndicate (two males accompanied by a female secretary). It was also a classic ruse to flood the scene…

With criminal convictions looking increasingly unlikely, the game’s corruption unit will pick up the investigation into the Pakistan betting scandal, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian. What happens to the three Pakistan cricketers under investigation is another matter. On the face of it, the News of the World appeared to have managed a perfect sting, where the subject Mazhar Majeed seemed able to satisfy that paper of his ability to manipulate events within matches. The no-balls at Lord’s, apparently to order, appeared to verify this. However, anyone who has had…

It’s not just Mohammad Asif’s cricket career that has suffered because of the spot-fixing scandal surrounding the Lord’s Test, his potential movie career has taken a hit too. Asif was offered a role in an Indian film, Mazhavillilinattamvare (Till the edge of the rainbow), but has been dropped after the News of the World sting. “He is a friendly and nice guy. I was shocked to hear about the allegations, so I dropped him from the film,” the director Kaithapram Damodaran Namboodiri told BBC. “He was to play a Pakistani…

The nuances and statistics that make cricket such a compelling game for millions around the world are exactly what make it so vulnerable to fixing by players. Aside from taking bets on the results of matches, bookmakers offer odds on just about anything — the number of catches in a game, the amount of time it lasts and, in the latest case, when bowlers will be penalized by the umpire for a…