TIPPING POINT:Only the naïve will believe putting Butt, Asif and Amir behind bars has drawn some sort of ethical line in the sand

IT IS right and proper that the trio of Pakistan players, and the agent at the heart of the cricket-fixing trial, find themselves doing time. Isn’t it?  Okay, none of them might have been involved in murder, rape or pillage, but their sporting instincts were as far over the line as their feet were during those notorious “no-ball” incidents that plunged the game into 14 months of painful introspection.

So something has to happen to them, right?

Still, though, jail – for something so stupid?

The fundamental basis of any sport is that spectators believe what they’re looking at. The dangers of having that belief threatened are illustrated every time a major athletics championship takes place, or during the Tour de France.

Unfair as it may be, the doubt about drugs is always there, provoking a detachment that is the very antithesis of what sport should be.

Certainly no one believes cricket has suddenly become squeaky clean on the back of jailing these guys. It did, after all, require the sleaziest of tabloids to do what cricket’s authorities might reasonably have been expected to do themselves. And with the billions circulating throughout the globe in betting turnover, only the naïve will believe putting Butt, Asif and Amir behind bars has drawn some sort of ethical line in the sand.

In fact, the real danger here is that cricket’s authorities will now smugly believe they are on top of things and ignore the suspicion that this debacle is little else but a faintly ridiculous sideshow, perfect for generating tabloid headlines, but more or less irrelevant to the realities of betting on sport.

There are two fundamental realities to any kind of gambling. The first is getting your bet on. The second is getting paid if you win.

If the sports agent, Mazhar Majeed, is indeed the diabolical criminal mastermind who carved up cricket to his heart’s content, then he would have quickly calculated when talking to the News Of The World hack that something was badly whiffy and his backside would have been a blur out the door.

Getting £150,000 (€175,000) for a few no-balls is the stuff of fantasy. The automatic assumption if you’re on the take like that is that the guy doing the bribing has a way of making way more than that £150,000 punting. But no one I’ve spoken to in the betting industry believes that is realistic.

For one thing, few if any of the regulated bookmakers in this part of the world offer markets on no-balls. Even if they did, does anyone think a sudden deluge of money on such an unusual bet wouldn’t set alarm bells ringing?

Anyone who has ever tried to get even a couple of hundred quid on at a double-figure price in a betting shop knows the reality of having their docket being examined like a hand-grenade before the inevitable phone call to head-office. As for computer and phone betting, gambling patterns are recorded like each individual’s financial conscience.

Getting thousands down on the quiet on such a bet is simply not on, even if a Faginesque plot containing hundreds of street urchins slapping down 20 quid each in betting shops around the country was possible, which it isn’t in a digital environment where information moves faster than thought.

Even in that vast amorphous betting jungle that is characterised as simply “Asia”, a mysterious cauldron of illegal gambling and criminality, certain financial realities apply and one is that you don’t get to handle five-figure bets without knowing how to distinguish a mug from a divvy-up.

Images of backstreet Hong Kong dives with Triad maniacs armed to the teeth and dealing in telephone figures, virulently carving up world sport through the power of bottomless financial reserves ignores the reality that bookmaking is the most cautious business imaginable. Only punters take chances, never the layers.

Majeed was naïve, and greedy, and stupid.

So were the players. The temptation of supposedly easy money proved too much, a sure way of getting nothing for something, in this case, reputations and careers reduced to ashes. But if greed and stupidity were crimes in themselves, the business and political elites of much of the world would be treading warily in the showers right now. And they aren’t, which is why the suspicion must be that these guys, especially the 19-year-old kid, Amir, are, at least to some extent, being hung out to dry.

Even Hansie Cronje, the late South African captain, didn’t get put in the chokey and he was dealing in figures a lot bigger than a couple of grand for fixing matches just over a decade ago. He got banned from playing for life. But he wasn’t put in jail.

In the great pantheon of criminality, stiffing the sporting public might be distasteful, but stiffing bookmakers is vanilla stuff, crime-lite. It’s roguish, fun even, especially if you’re in on it. Movies are made on the basic premise that nobody likes the bookies. Have a look at Murphy’s Stroke, a film about the Gay Future saga in 1974.

Gay Future was the racehorse at the centre of a betting coup by an Irish betting syndicate. He was a ringer who sluiced up at Cartmel to complete a perfect set-up in which a couple of other horses were withdrawn in order to allow a series of combination bets roll on to the good thing. It even had the perfect dramatic denouement of the cute Irish being left down by an incompetent Brit who left the cat out of the bag to the bookies.

It was all very colourful, exciting and warm. Pierse Brosnan even played Gay Future’s trainer. And it ended up with the syndicate leaders being convicted of attempted fraud. Only a sympathetic judge meant they escaped with lenient fines.

But they did escape.

These Pakistani cricketers were done for attempting to defraud bookmakers too and they get jail. Try making cinematic schmaltz out of that.

But that wouldn’t be cricket. Expectations of the game, especially in England, are above such things. Jail allows the illusion of decisive action, even if it is based on something as substantially irrelevant to the real gambling threat as this “no-balls” stuff.

What the suits have to remember is that getting on and then getting paid are what it is all about.

And when it comes to match-fixing, only the most pious will believe that putting these four in jail is anything more than a fig-leaf.