Blame it on Butt!

Skipper Salman Butt and his two co-accused in spot-fixing have declared their innocence. So before I bash the little Butt (accused of being the ringleader), my beef is towards the big Butt – I mean Ejaz Butt. He’s like a cat with nine lives. So far he’s managed to survive many knotty scandals and snarky scoldings from the NA’s Standing Committee for Sports. Remember how Chairman Jamshed Dasti punched Chairman Butt with his tongue? Lucky for Butt that his bete noire himself got knocked out by the Supreme Court for holding a fake BA degree.
Ejaz Butt should be in a reality TV show as a survivor. How does he do it, considering the man is anything but fleet-footed and hardly has an arrow-sharp brain? Being the Defence Minister Ahmad Mukhtar’s brother-in-law is one possible armour in his defence. One can’t say the same of manager Yawar Saeed. Is he in England because his son-in-law is Minister Raza Rabbani? No! He’s there because of his own cricketing past and proven managerial abilities. Son of Mian Mohammad Saeed, Pakistan’s first captain just after independence, Saeed must now make way for a younger man.
In fact anybody over 50 should be banned from going as a manager. And anybody over sixty is a defining ‘No’ to head Pakistan Cricket Board. Trust me, if we adopt an age bar, our boys, I mean players, would never dare to cheat during matches knowing that there are two pairs of steel eyes scrutinizing their shady deals. But with septuagenarians shepherding wild cards like Salman, Asif and Amir during the current UK tour, fooling them is no biggie!
Enter our cigar-toting high commissioner in London. He has unilaterally declared that the three accused players are “innocent.” Wrong! The ICC has suspended the three based on evidence. Hassan should stick to writing opinion columns, fomenting and frothing about the ‘wicked’ Pakistani media poking a hole in democracy and demolishing Zardari domination. “There are some subversive elements that are hell-bent to run down the democratic government” he cringes “and are busy in casting aspersions on even good-intentioned (flood relief) initiatives to make them look with suspicion… there is no shortcut remedy to cure such sick minds who see rat even in a good cause.” [ahem...your metaphors need tuning, Sir]
Some TV anchors are worse than Goebbels, Hassan says. Stop! How about His Excellency turning his guns on the second-largest selling newspaper in the world, The News of the World, the tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, the man who owns Fox News and Wall Street Journal in the US? Can he take them on for printing the cricket story? Mr Hassan is too small a fry to even go there. Can our high commissioner, caught on camera whisking away damning evidence (a dozen cartons) against Zardari’s Swiss cases, haul up RAW and Indian bookies alleged to have set up our players? “Delhi is responsible for sending out ‘bookie bombs’ that are destroying cricket in general,” says a screaming headline. Better still, how about asking President Zardari to ban Fox News in Pakistan as an eye for an eye to teach Big Daddy Murdoch a lesson?
“I never let politics interfere with merit. I never played favourites. I kept my eye on the ball. And I practiced what I preached,” Air Marshal (r) Nur Khan
said when I asked him why he was rated the best PCB (from1980 to ’84) chief. But in recent times, the man at the helm treats PCB as his handmaiden. Zardari won’t sack Butt because he owes Ahmad Mukhtar one. Scroll down the PCB’s chief executive list and you’ll find a businessman, a general, a diplomat, a physician and a test cricketer-turned tycoon in the last ten years.
Other than ace diplomat Shaharyar Khan (though he too earned media flak towards his end), all have proved to be knuckleheads. “Everything can be fixed if you take politics out of the equation and concentrate on good governance.” This was the wisdom I received from Nur Khan.
Butt must go! Let’s see a show of hands.