Match-fixing scandal didn't surprise me at all

Three Pakistan cricket players have been charged for taking bribes for match fixing. They are denying it but the easiest thing to do — and also the dumbest thing — is to bowl no balls at any given time.

This is something that’s been going on forever in Pakistan and I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to stamp this out in cricket with the amount of money that’s involved.

This didn’t surprise me at all. If anything surprised me it was the overwhelming evidence with the recordings.

Mohammad Amir is such a talent as a left-arm bowler. He probably could have had a $1 million contract from the IPL, an English county team could have picked him up which would have netted him another $500,000.

If he’s done it, that’s just crazy. He could have made so much money by playing by the rules. He would have been a multi-millionaire anyway. That’s just dumb.

This doesn’t just happen at this level, all forms of the game can be tainted by it.

When we were playing in the World Cup we had meetings with the ICC corruption squad to let us know what we should do if we got phone calls from people to ask us to fix a match.

They had an hour seminar with all the teams to let us know what’s going on. It was an eye-opener for me. You don’t have to be the best player or best team in the world to help throw a match.

We’re certainly not immune to it.

I’ve been offered money to throw league games and Cup Match. Not to the kind of money the Pakistan players were offered, just a few hundred dollars.

I’ve been offered $700 to not make runs to help lose the game. It’s on a much smaller scale here in Bermuda. I am sure I am not the only one. Other players have been offered a bit of money here and there to sway games.

People are betting on football, cricket and other sports here. It could be a drug dealer who has his own underground gambling den. You can bet on anything in Bermuda. It’s just them giving players a call or stopping by and slipping them money to throw something.

Four years ago, when I was captain of St. George’s for Cup Match the first time, I was offered money. I declined because it’s not worth my reputation.

I’ve heard of guys in Premier Division football who have been offered money not to score goals or goalkeepers being offered money to let in goals.

But how is anybody going to prove that? It’s just one person’s word against another’s. There’s no tape recordings or secret film.

Twenty20

We had a good start in defending our title as we won convincingly against Social Club, but they did give us a good run.

We were able to give some youngsters some time and blend them in with some of the senior players.

This is the type of exciting cricket that everyone looks forward to and wants to be involved with.

We have a good chance of defending our title. Some of the other clubs will be missing key players as the national team goes on tour next week.

Our first goal is to advance from our group of eight so we’ll have to win five out of the seven games to go through to the semi-finals.

At that point we’ll have to push through to win the title. We’ve never lost a twenty20 game since it came in two years ago.

That makes us the team to beat.

Hopefully the weather will be good this weekend so we can get the matches in. We’ve had a lot of matches affected by rain this season so it would be nice to have a good run here.