Pakistan at the centre of cricket match-fixing allegations - again

Who can forget that catch dropped by the Captain of pakistan team?

It was too good to be true. The Champions Trophy had been run and won in an efficient and no-fuss manner - and it finally seemed like the International Cricket Council had figured out how to do something right.

There were even good-news stories dominating headlines, like the sportsmanship shown by Daniel Vettori to the thoroughly undeserving Paul Collingwood and similarly with Andrew Strauss doing the right thing by Angelo Mathews.

But it couldn’t last and now the tournament has been tarnished by claims of match-fixing.

In a game dominated by mind-boggling sums of money and the focus of gambling on a global scale, it is perhaps surprising that these allegations don’t come up more often. Sadly, however, when issues of this nature arise, the focus invariably turns to Pakistan.

To suggest that Pakistan’s cricket side is enigmatic is to do them an injustice. On their day, they are capable of exquisite cricket, full of flair and excitement. On their off-days, however, they are woeful, seemingly incapable of the simplest acts and besieged by bickering and disunity.

And they are never too far away from the latest controversy.

And who can forget the bout of ‘roid rage that saw Akhtar use Asif as a dressing-room piñata.

As if these aren’t enough, we have the dreadful Keystone Kops efforts surrounding Bob Woolmer’s death at the last World Cup. His untimely death set in progress one of the most shameful episodes in cricket's history.

Hindsight tells us that Woolmer was the victim of nothing worse than bad timing, but it speaks volumes for the low regard in which Pakistani cricket is held that, after the initial stunned disbelief, we were all willing to accept that Woolmer had been murdered and that the team’s performance at that tournament was somehow responsible.

Now we have the allegations coming out of the Champions Trophy that Pakistan deliberately threw a game to stop India reaching the finals and that they tanked again in the semi-final. While the latter is hard to believe, the catch Younis Khan dropped against New Zealand showed spectacular ineptitude