It had been a stellar year for Shakib Al Hasan, the captain of the Bangladeshi cricket team, until on 29 October he was banned from cricket for a year for failing to report inappropriate discussions with an alleged bookmaker. CSC Professor Dan Hough puzzles over why people who know the rules still sometimes break them.
Shakib Al Hasan, the captain of the Bangladeshi cricket team and doyen of Bangladeshi cricket, had a very good summer. He scored 606 runs in cricket’s World Cup, ending as the tournament’s third highest run scorer. He was the jewel in the Bangladeshi cricketing crown.
His Autumn has been altogether different. On 29 October he was banned from all cricket for a year (with a further year suspended) on account of failing to report inappropriate discussions with an alleged bookmaker. He’d fallen foul of the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) rules on how to nip potentially corrupt behaviour in the bud.
Shakib has scored in excess of 11,000 international runs and has taken more than 500 international wickets. He’s had a distinguished career. That career won’t be expunged from the record books. His name will nonetheless be added to the more than 40 players who have been banned for an array of corruption offences. A sorry end to what should have been a year that Shakib could look back on with real pride.
How did it come to this?
Players with Shakib’s experience should not find themselves in this position. As was widely noted in the press, he’ll have attended numerous briefings on how to deal with people asking for information on games that he was playing in. He will have known the warning signs; people whom he didn’t really know asking about team selections, people whom he had never met asking him for his bank account details. When those sorts of issues come up in conversation, you report them to the ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU). This really isn’t rocket science, and Shakib will have known it.