Pakistan's captain Misbah-ul-Haq, left, and his England counterpart Andrew Strauss get on with the preliminaries at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium.
Andrew Strauss has warned English cricket against taking the moral high ground over spot-fixing on the eve of the first Test against Pakistan.
This is the teams' first meeting since 2010, when they played out an acrimonious one-day series after the spot-fixing scandal emerged during the fourth and final Test at Lord's, so Strauss and several other England players have been stressing the need to "move on" from that controversy.
But the first irrefutable evidence of corruption in the county game has emerged in the lead-up to this Test, with the young Essex bowler Mervyn Westfield pleading guilty to accepting money to bowl badly in a one-day game against Durham in 2009.
Tony Palladino, the former Essex seamer who reported Westfield to the county to prompt the police investigation, said in an interview in Monday's Sun that: "You'd be a fool to think that spot-fixing wasn't happening at Essex before, and at other counties."
When asked about those comments in the incongruous surroundings of Dubai's International Cricket Stadium, Strauss urged any other county players with knowledge of corruption to take advantage of the amnesty announced last week by the England and Wales Cricket Board.
"This is not the time to show loyalty to team-mates or friends or people you know," said the England captain. "This is the time to do what is right for the game of cricket. It took me completely by surprise when the allegations first came out, and I've certainly not witnessed anything in my time. But let's not be arrogant and just assume it's not there because clearly there has been an incident, and if there has been one incident then there is a fair chance that there have been others.
"The ECB have provided an amnesty for players to come forward in the next three months and I'd urge them to do that if they have any information. If it is there we need to root it out. If you want world cricket to be in good order then you have to make sure your own house is clean first."
Misbah-ul-Haq, the 37-year-old with a degree in business management who has led the rehabilitation of the Pakistan team since succeeding the disgraced Salman Butt as captain late in 2010, repeated the assertion he gave last week that cricket's rogue nation have cleaned up their own house over the past 16 months or so.
"The main thing I have told the team is you can get your image back only by playing good cricket, by winning, by good conduct in the field and out of the field," he said. "That's what we are trying to do, and I think we are pretty much successful in that, the way we are doing things, the way we are playing the last year and a half. I think we are on the right path. That's what we want to do in the future also."
Strauss and Misbah will meet with Javagal Srinath, the former India seamer who is the ICC's match referee, on the eve of the match. Perhaps surprisingly, given the record of acrimony between the teams and the significance of the contest, the ICC has appointed the least experienced umpire on its elite panel, Bruce Oxenford – an Australian who has stood in only one Test – for the match, alongside the idiosyncratic New Zealander Billy Bowden.
Source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/jan/16/pakistan-england-first-test-dubai?newsfeed=trueThis is the teams' first meeting since 2010, when they played out an acrimonious one-day series after the spot-fixing scandal emerged during the fourth and final Test at Lord's, so Strauss and several other England players have been stressing the need to "move on" from that controversy.
But the first irrefutable evidence of corruption in the county game has emerged in the lead-up to this Test, with the young Essex bowler Mervyn Westfield pleading guilty to accepting money to bowl badly in a one-day game against Durham in 2009.
Tony Palladino, the former Essex seamer who reported Westfield to the county to prompt the police investigation, said in an interview in Monday's Sun that: "You'd be a fool to think that spot-fixing wasn't happening at Essex before, and at other counties."
When asked about those comments in the incongruous surroundings of Dubai's International Cricket Stadium, Strauss urged any other county players with knowledge of corruption to take advantage of the amnesty announced last week by the England and Wales Cricket Board.
"This is not the time to show loyalty to team-mates or friends or people you know," said the England captain. "This is the time to do what is right for the game of cricket. It took me completely by surprise when the allegations first came out, and I've certainly not witnessed anything in my time. But let's not be arrogant and just assume it's not there because clearly there has been an incident, and if there has been one incident then there is a fair chance that there have been others.
"The ECB have provided an amnesty for players to come forward in the next three months and I'd urge them to do that if they have any information. If it is there we need to root it out. If you want world cricket to be in good order then you have to make sure your own house is clean first."
Misbah-ul-Haq, the 37-year-old with a degree in business management who has led the rehabilitation of the Pakistan team since succeeding the disgraced Salman Butt as captain late in 2010, repeated the assertion he gave last week that cricket's rogue nation have cleaned up their own house over the past 16 months or so.
"The main thing I have told the team is you can get your image back only by playing good cricket, by winning, by good conduct in the field and out of the field," he said. "That's what we are trying to do, and I think we are pretty much successful in that, the way we are doing things, the way we are playing the last year and a half. I think we are on the right path. That's what we want to do in the future also."
Strauss and Misbah will meet with Javagal Srinath, the former India seamer who is the ICC's match referee, on the eve of the match. Perhaps surprisingly, given the record of acrimony between the teams and the significance of the contest, the ICC has appointed the least experienced umpire on its elite panel, Bruce Oxenford – an Australian who has stood in only one Test – for the match, alongside the idiosyncratic New Zealander Billy Bowden.
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