Annual Let’s Charge Cricketers with Treason and Sentence Them to Death Day

Since surveying corruption I’m seeing it everywhere. Today, Mexico fired 3,200 corrupt police officers and Brazil announced the Clean Slate law that will ban 5,000 people from contesting October’s elections due to corruption allegations.

Think that’s bad? Pakistani cricketers accused of corruption relating to a betting scandal angered the cricket-mad country so much that lawyers filed treason charges against the players. The sentence for treason in Pakistan is death. 

Also in the news today, Henry Olonga, the first black man to play cricket for Zimbabwe, explained that he too faces treason charges and the death penalty. But he committed no crime: while representing Zimbabwe in a high-profile match he simply wore a black-armband to “mourn the death of democracy.” President Robert Mugabe didn’t like that so much, but he sure loves cricket, once proclaiming “Cricket civilizes people and creates good gentlemen.”

Confused by cricket? TMN’s Kevin Guilfoile (who has an extract from his new book The Thousand on TMN today) explains the rules of cricket with an extended pie-analogy.

To protect your pies, you have a bat, and when he throws the ball, you swing the bat and try to swat the ball away. If you hit it, you and the other pie-eater switch places and then you can eat one of his pies.