Is he really cricket's latest whistleblower? As I last understood the job description, whistleblowers reveal the rottenness of an entity they are a part of, usually at great cost to themselves. Rashid Latif outed several people in his own side in the mid-90s, including the captain. He was a whistleblower.
So far Zulqarnain has outed an Asian man who speaks a little Urdu. To the ACSU: good luck finding him in Dubai, which is short of neither Asians nor Urdu-speakers. ESPNcricinfo understands the ACSU has not been told a great deal more so far than what Haider has publicly said. This is not whistleblowing yet; this is finding an incredibly convoluted way of reporting an approach by a suspect personality.
The other revelation is concerning a domestic 50-over game from March 2009, and it isn't much of a revelation. Haider was dumped as captain of Lahore Eagles ahead of the game, against National Bank of Pakistan (NBP), because, he says, he refused to pick players imposed upon him. The scorecard has a bizarre, men-against-children look to it. Two players who played for the Eagles hadn't played before and have not played since; one of them conceded 78 runs in three overs. To squeeze into the narrative, the implication is that the game was fixed and that Haider faced similar threats; moreover an NBP side with Salman Butt, Mohammad Amir and Kamran Akmal is a fine bit of clinching evidence.
Why let the truth get in the way of a good yarn, eh? One of the players selected was no cricketer but no fixer either; his father is a local Lahore administrator who desperately wanted his son to play a representative game. It is the kind of forced selection that the subcontinent's domestic- and junior-level cricket is littered with. It is a problem, but of a different type entirely.
The Eagles, incidentally, are the poor cousins of Lahore, the second-string team in which play the second-string talent of the city. They had lost three games fairly convincingly before this one. Above all, the match wasn't even televised, and TV we know, is the oxygen of bookie-dom.
For now, Haider is simply an asylum seeker, not a whistleblower.
Much else besides should be questioned. Why did he leave updates on Facebook for all to see? And go to a TV reporter first instead of approaching the PCB or the ACSU? That, I find difficult to dispute, says more about Haider than it does about either the PCB or ACSU. The PCB is inept, incompetent, disgraceful, but to assume they may be in cahoots with the underworld is still a considerable leap. And Tim May's argument that the ACSU cannot be trusted to keep secrets is irrelevant here at best. The one thing that is blindingly clear is that Haider is not a man looking for anonymity.
| To swat the story away, as some have, on the basis that Haider is no player of significance is to be blind. He was the wicketkeeper, a position Pakistan should know only too well, is uniquely capable of affecting the course of entire matches | |||
Nor did he approach anyone in the team. It's been easy to forget over the last few months that there remain characters in and around Pakistan cricket untainted by such muck; could not even one, such as a Younis Khan, or an Abdul Razzaq be confided in? Haider says he wanted to protect the team by not telling them. Letting them find out after he has told the whole world is a strange kind of protection.
Why wait four days and one game before leaving? Why go to the UK and leave your family in the protection of the Lahore police, which, as every citizen of that beautiful city knows, is no protection at all?
Equally there is no need to be as dismissive and vindictive towards Haider as some of the reactions from the rumpus that passes for the cricket community here.
The approach itself is as believable as not. Who would still approach a side under such scrutiny? Or is it simply that the hooks are in that deep? But to swat it away, as some have, on the basis that Haider is no player of significance, is to be blind. He was the wicketkeeper, a position Pakistan should know only too well, is uniquely capable of affecting the course of entire matches. Approaching a wicketkeeper, in fact, makes immense sense. Calling into question Haider's mental health, as the team manager has done, is in outright bad taste.
What little I saw of Haider as a cricketer, I liked. He isn't a great wicketkeeper - and the bar has been set remarkably low by Kamran Akmal - but clearly there is something in Haider that functional teams should like: a little fight, a little heart, something that equates to more than just the parts. But a significant part of me looks at how energetically he hunts for media attention and how much of it he has attracted in a short career; then to this episode, with real suspicion. Another part can't work out why he would give up a budding career as an international cricketer if not because of something serious.
That is the real frustration of the last week - the lack of any real resolution between those parts.
