After all, why should a bookmaker, even one operating illegally in India, offer acceptable sums for meagre information about the state of the pitch and the weather?Taylor and Waugh, who gave evidence in the Pakistani match-fixing inquiry in Lahore on 7 October 1998, were instructed by the ACB to tell the whole truth.They were, says Taylor, mightily relieved not to be asked about the Australian inquiry and the subsequent fines. There was more booing yesterday when he came on to bowl, though the volume was well down.The reason for their fear and shame should be clear from the fact that when Warne and Waugh accused Salim Malik of offering each of them $200,000 to lose matches during a tour of Pakistan, they claimed the offer had come only one month after we now know they had taken the bookmaker’s sweetener.The proximity of these two events suggests to their captain Mark Taylor, and to most people who can read a timetable, that they might well be connected. The booing that greeted his long walk to the wicket on Friday was considered significant enough to make the front pages of Saturday’s papers, and when he walked back to the pavilion, caught and bowled by Peter Such for seven after being brutally softened up by Darren Gough, there was an unsympathetic silence. When I watched them read their statements and sidle away in Adelaide on Wednesday, I thought Warne looked sheepish and shifty at the same time; Waugh seemed fearful He may have reason to be. These millions were apparently not enough.Both players are reported to have been angered by the revelations. He is a man of the world – with no illusions about the cupidity of some contemporary sportsmen who earn a lot of money and for whom it isn’t enough – but the affair has spoiled his summer.Warne, who is well paid for playing cricket, also has sponsorship deals with Nike, Channel 9, Foxtel, Just Jeans, Gunn and Moore bats, Sony Music, Nicorette – who will pay him $200,000 if he gives up smoking – the Melbourne Age, and, until Thursday, our own Mirror, who are said to have paid around $150,000 for a column covering the Ashes and the World Cup. How right he was; Coward’s judgement has proved no less “naive and stupid” than Warne’s and Waugh’s.There are, of course, commentators who say that we shouldn’t be too hard on the boys; they messed up and paid a penalty.

But these commentators are mostly former cricketers such as Bill Lawry and Ian Botham, for whom to know all is to forgive all, and their reaction is a distortion of the reaction in Australia, which has been of anger and disenchantment.The story still led the television evening news on Friday night, when the Prime Minister, John Howard, feeling the pressure for a government- linked investigation, made a public statement ruling this out I happened on a friend from Sydney. Halbish said that there were lots of rumours about illegal betting and he was not prepared to discuss rumours. Halbish stands guilty of being economical with the truth.Coward explained the reason for the cover-up to AAP, the Australian news agency, last week: secrecy was adopted, he said, because the public would assume something worse was involved if the case became public. The chairman of the Board at the time, Alan Coward, the then chief executive Graeme Halbish and Waugh himself refused to comment. Warne and Waugh were fined $A8,000 and $A10,000 respectively, and all the participants appreciated that the best thing was to keep mum.The only outsiders who were told happened to be passing through Sydney at the time; they were the president (Sir Clyde Walcott), and the chief executive (David Richards) of the International Cricket Council, an organisation with its headquarters at Lord’s, where no one knows how to spell the word transparency.Ray reports that a year later, in 1996, the Age received anonymous information that Waugh had been fined by the ACB. The Australian cricket team were on their way from New Zealand where the pair had confessed to receiving $A11,000 from a bookmaker from New Delhi, flying first to London and then on to the West Indies, where they would play a crucial series that would decide the unofficial world championship of cricket.
The last thing the ACB wanted was a public admission about the affair, says Mark Ray in an authoritative account of the affair in the Melbourne Age. THEY THOUGHT the deed had been executed with splendid precision.

Shane Warne and Mark Waugh had sold their reputations for a mess of potage in Colombo in September 1994. Within six months the Australian Cricket Board believed they had resolved the difficulty. And hardly anyone knew about the terse disciplinary hearing that had been held at an airport hotel in Sydney in February 1995. Despite the hopes of nationalists and conspiracy theorists it appears that this is one scandal born and bred in Pakistan.. She said that no new foreign players, or governments for that matter, had been named in any hearings.

Some seriously believe that the whole affair is all actually a plot by the Indian secret services or the Americans to destabilise Pakistan.However, Fareshta Gati-Aslam, a cricket correspondent for The News who gave evidence to the inquiry, is more phlegmatic. Many Pakistanis believe that a global network of bribe-taking players will be exposed. From statements given to the PCB it would seem that the going rate for throwing a one-day game is $10,000 for each player although Aamir Sohail was reported to have told the committee that four years ago, he had been offered $120,000 to get himself out before scoring 10 runs and to get his opening partner, Saeed Anwar, run out too.The question now being asked is who else might be involved and what other big names might be revealed when Qayyum presents his report. Half their team-mates were around but no one seemed to bat an eye-lid,” he said.After an initial meeting – when money changes hands – all further contacts are by telephone. “I sat in the coffee bar of one big hotel while the brown envelopes were handed to players.