NO SOONER had the second edition of the Pakistan Super League got underway than the tournament was hit by cricket’s latest spot-fixing scandal.
With the dust barely settled from last Thursday’s opening ceremony and the entertaining game that followed it, the next afternoon came the revelation that two Islamabad United batsmen, Sharjeel Khan and Khalid Latif, had been provisionally suspended under the Pakistan Cricket Board’s Anti-Corruption Code as part of an ongoing investigation into an organisation’s alleged attempts to corrupt the tournament.
The pair were sent home in disgrace, with Shaharyar Khan, the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, hinting that there could be more to follow and promising that a ‘wide-ranging investigation’ would take place ‘as part of collective efforts to protect the integrity of the sport’.
For Sharjeel in particular, the man who had lit up the latter stages of the first PSL and scored its only century so far, as well as becoming Pakistan’s new great limited-overs hope, it was quite the fall from grace – suddenly he was facing the prospect that his cricketing career could well be over.
As predicted, that was far from the end of the story as far as the PSL was concerned, and on what was still just the third day of the tournament, the news broke that three more players were being questioned.
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