Many of us, Yahaluweni, have a problem when the game is given a negative image.

And this is what has been happening this past week in the sunny Caribbean where the crime rate makes even the seedier parts of Colombo and the environs on this island capital’s doorstep appear a mild event.

There we have Sir Allen Stanford, as would some tacky bourgeois politician, making out with the England players wives and girlfriends and making fools of them at his expense and then pretending it was all a mistake and he was asked to get in on the act for a cheap TV shot.

This is almost as bad as the Fox News daily bilge on a local TV channel pouring out the John McCain-Sarah Palin show with nauseous regularity and while they wear the ‘I love America badge’ on their sleeves, they forget how many in Iraq and Afghanistan have been tortured for ‘liberty’ in the dishonest hunt for weapons of mass destruction.

This is the country that has baseball, basketball, Big Macs, Bush and some other unfortunate Bs and where Ms Palin goes Moose hunting and agrees with a gun culture and torture.

This is also the nation where in Texas, in the 1930s under the old Jim Crow law, would skin alive a Negro and hang his body and get away with it as they would claim it was ‘justice’. This is Stanford’s country. The ‘Land of the free and home of the brave’.

But watching 15 minutes of the Stanford Millions where England lost was more than enough to switch anyone off – anyone that is who having watched four days of a Test in New Delhi, couldn’t wait for day five to start. The Stanford gimmick is gaudy, brash and indiscriminate. It may have a lot to do with showbiz style marketing suitable for a presidential style election, but there is a difference between taste and the burgers and fries which Stanford is serving up in the name of cricket.

By comparison, Kerry Packer at least knew what he was doing and the reasons behind it. He didn’t have an ego to satisfy. He was a businessman and saw an opportunity. Stanford needs to spend his millions to satisfy an ego which is part of his skewered libido.

It is as bad as the Sri Lanka Premier League, stalled for the sake of some honest brokering and it appears, as revealed in these notes last week, affecting a large number of players who need to play a certain number of first-class games to qualify for a contract among the various leagues in England. It would be interesting if those players affected dec-ided to take legal action by suing those responsible for preventing them to make a living and bringing foreign exchange into the country through their remittances.

There are, it seems those selfish individuals who wou-ld rather not see the Premier League take place at all this season.

As the late Dr. C. H. Gunasekara wrote more than 50 years ago, there are far too many people involved in the game on the island who have their own agendas. Instead of serving the game they would serve either themselves or their masters.

While these may seem side issues of a domestic nature, there is another area which needs some attention, and as yet, the Inter-national Cricket Council is still checking out the details of the Salim Malik case, where the ban has been lifted.

Whatever his supporters may think, Salim will always be linked, as has been Hansie Cronjé, to the nefarious web spun by the game’s match fixers.

While a court in Lahore may have lifted his life ban, imposed by the Pakistan Cricket Board after the Mohammad Qayyym Report on such malpractices in 2000, there are still questions to be asked and answered of the former Pakistan captain about the charges.

Apart from the Shane Warne and Mark Waugh bribes, Malik’s name emerged as well during the King Commission probe in Cape Town mid-2000. This public commission had been established by the South African Government to probe Cronjé’s unprofessional conduct when the South African admitted to conniving with Indian bookmakers over a period of time from around early 1995.

Also stirring the cauldron that involved such iniquitous greedy scum is another South African, self-confessed exhibitionist Ma-rlon Aronstam. He became involved with Cronjé in the infamous rain-affected Centurion Test in January 2000.

It is all too easy to suggest that from the moment they were appointed captains, Malik and Cronjé were easy targets for Indian bookmakers and their pimps, were always looking for those who were easy to access for inside information. Here they used Malik’s possible early influence to interest South Africa’s captain.

Cronjé admitted to a feeling of embarrassment when asked by Malik had ‘John’ called with an offer made on January 10, 1995 during the first leg of the Mandela Cup final at Newlands. This emerged at what were the very public King Commission hearings that were televised as well as broadcast on radio: all very transparent. Nothing like this has been held before.

Of course, we only have Cronjé’s word that it was Malik who posed the question if Sanjay Chawla, aka ‘John’ had called with an offer. And as thieves who fall out normally do, Malik will deny that he talked to Cronjé about such a match-fixing episode. Denial by the glib- tongued in such circumstances is the easiest form of fraudulent behaviour.

In October 2001, Cronjé also attempted to have his life ban overturned, a move opposed by the then United Cricket Board, now Cricket South Africa with the International Cricket Council closely monitoring proceedings in the Pretoria High Court.

Cronjé was not present when Judge Frank Kirk-Cohen issued a highly critical judgement of the former South African captain’s connivance with bookmakers and re-established the status quo.

Although most people believe that the scourge of corruption has by no means been eradicated, at least the right of the game to rid itself of cheats has been confirmed. There are any number of South Asians who have suggested how the King Commission was a ‘typically dirty South African racist sham designed to belittle the image of the subcontinent as being one where rouges and criminal elements were involved in cricket malpractices and other acts of dishonesty.’

Such claimants are avoiding those facts outlined in the Qayyum report along with the startling revelations coming out of the King Commission. We are not only talking of legalities here but also the question of ethics. Mukesh Gupta, Chawla and their bookmaking pimps are real, not fictitious, and for Malik to suggest that he has been vindicated by the lifting of the ban is typical rhetoric from one who was caught, as was Cronjé, with his hand in the cash register.

During the Mandela Cup quadrangular series of 1994/95 rumours circulating that all was not well in the Pakistan camp re-emerged a couple of days before the inaugural Test at the Wanderers on January 16, 1995.

The tourists held their pre-Test training camps at Centurion Park, away from media attention. It was during this practice that the jovial Intikhab angrily chased away a dapper Asian wearing a grey silk suit, becoming upset when Malik, the captain, moved out of the nets to talk to the man.

Malik was already under pressure from criticism within the team over his handling of the side during the Mandela Trophy final and his strange decisions to bowl first in both legs of the final when history showed batting second was foolhardy.

Already there had been talk of bookies involvement and it is known that Wasim Akram, a late arrival because of a sinus operation in England, had tackled Malik about the claims when in Cape Town. These had been circulating since the last limited-overs series in Sharjah the previous April. Phrases such as ‘Mumbai ring’ were also openly talked about by a couple of Pakistan reporters in the Wanderers media box during the Test.

It was during the early stages of the Zimbabwe tour in early February 1995 when two ripe pimples, marked innuendo and suspicion, were split open with serious implications.

The emerald city of Sydney hosted an interesting meeting: Shane Warne, Mark Waugh and Tim May had accused Malik of attempting to bribe the three Australians to throw the Test in Karachi the previous September. Malik was emphatic in his denial. Wasim tackled him a second time and Malik again brushed it off.

While Malik has been cleared by a court in Lahore, the ICC needs to look closely at the judgement and the findings before making a decision whether he deserves to be cleared and the PCB drop the ban. Frankly, whether it is ten years or twenty, match-fixing offences are serious and as such, Malik should serve out the remainder of his punishment whatever its duration.