‘Tainted’ Butt landing job as TV expert ‘mind-boggling disgrace for cricket’: Roebuck

SYDNEY - The hiring of disgraced Pakistani cricketer Salman Butt by a TV channel is a “mind-boggling development” and an “indication that sections of the cricket community do not care about its reputation”, noted cricket columnist Peter Roebuck has said.

Pakistan’s Channel Five, which has hired Butt as an expert commentator during the World Cup, considers him to be a “suitable person to pass opinions on the fortunes of the side and country he betrayed,” Roebuck wrote in The Age.

“As a result, honest players will toil away on the field while their erstwhile captain, a man who used his position not to advance the cause but to feather his own nest, sits in air-conditioned comfort and counts his money. Most likely he will earn more than them. To put it mildly, the players will be entitled to think the world a curious place,” the former Somerset captain added.

He noted that while Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif, who have been banned along with Butt by the ICC on spot-fixing charges, will also miss the tournament and indeed the next five years, “no news has arrived about sweeteners offered to this pair. Perhaps their tongues are not sufficiently silky.”

Roebuck said it was obvious that the ICC cannot control the conduct of TV stations, but, “it can urge each country to take all possible steps to protect a game likely to suffer even more grievous blows when the criminal case begins in England in September.”

He pointed out that duly appointed jurists had found that Butt betrayed his responsibilities as Test captain of the Pakistan cricket team.

“Cricket cannot hope to contain, let alone eliminate, corruption when compromised captains are offered plum jobs straight after they have been exposed as unscrupulous characters prepared to use their positions to collect crooked money and to that end willing to corrupt the youngest player in their charge. As far as cricket is concerned, it cannot come much worse than that,” Roebuck added. (ANI)