I certainly have no hard feelings about playing against Amir again: Stuart Broad

Sour memories will freshen up when England will host Pakistan later this month in the home series. It’s almost six years since Pakistan last played in England’s backyard. The 2010 series was by far the most controversial English summer. It ended in utter humiliation for the visiting team which was caught amid the spot-fixing storm – involving three of its players.  Mohammad Amir, Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif were exposed in the sting operation.

England fast bowler Stuart Broad was having a great time both with the bat and ball during the series before hs contributions were overshadowed by the disgraceful events. He will now shake Pakistan fast bowler Mohammad Amir’s hand when the pair face each other at Lord’s in 11 days.

Broad may never forgive Amir for the central part he played in cricket’s worst corruption scandal ever to play out on UK shores but he is at least willing to accept he has a future in the game.

Broad might find it difficult to forgive Amir. The Englishman hit his only Test century to date in the 2010 Test during which Amir, Mohammad Asif and Captain Salman Butt were exposed as spot-fixers by a newspaper sting.

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Amir, who was then 18 years old, served three months in Portland Young Offenders Institution and then a five-year ban. Broad, who dedicated his maiden Test hundred to his deceased step-mother Miche two days before discovering no-balls were being bowled to order during his innings, has since won four Ashes series and become the world’s No 1-ranked bowler while claiming career best Test figures of eight for 15 against Australia last summer in the process.

But the scars remain. There is bitter frustration, anger even, that a sport Broad has loved his whole life was so cynically abused by Amir, Butt and Asif, while the nightmarish memories of the 2010 summer are etched in his mind.

‘I remember driving home after that Lord’s Test and just wanting to be alone,’ he told The Mail on Sunday. ‘I wanted to be at home. I didn’t want to see or hear any more news on it because we had a one-day series to play and we had to try to focus on that.

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‘Swanny had got a five-for and ended up on the honours board on the Sunday morning after the allegations broke but he didn’t even crack a smile. He was probably the most emotional about it. He won’t mind me saying that.”

‘Ofcourse it annoys me that that game will always be connected with what went on. Lord’s is the home of cricket. It’s a wonderful place to play and that Test match will always be remembered for the wrong reasons. It was my best-ever innings, my only Test century and coming in tough circumstances as well. It was a good battle and I’ll never forget the feeling I got running through for that hundred.”

“From what we know, the three Pakistan players weren’t actually fixing the game as a whole — a no-ball doesn’t affect if I hit a four or not — so I can still look back with a lot of pride on scoring that hundred. But of course it was tarnished by what happened.”

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Former England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) chairman Giles Clarke was so incensed by the revelations published in the now defunct News of the World that he refused to shake Amir’s hand when he took to the stage during the awards ceremony at Lord’s.

But with the ECB facing the prospect of having to refund millions of pounds to broadcasters, ticket holders and venues, it was decided to continue with the one-day series as planned.

When Pakistan Cricket Board Chairman Ijaz Butt accused Andrew Strauss’s team of cheating after their batting collapse in the third game of the five-match series at The Oval, the team’s collective tolerance snapped and they wanted to pull out.

Butt’s extraordinary claims, without any evidence, prompted a furious response from Strauss’s England’s players, already angered that the Lord’s Test was tainted.

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“The one-day series after that was ugly,’ said Broad. ‘There was so much going on. It became really vicious. We had Ijaz Butt saying we were the cheats. Trotty [Jonathan Trott] and Wahab Riaz had a fight. It hardly caused a ripple but Shoaib Akhtar was pictured scratching the ball with his boot in the final game [which England won to claim the series 3-2]. Nothing positive came out of the summer.”

‘Three of their players had been implicated but there were stories it was going to happen in the one-day series and allegations they’d fixed a game against Australia in Sydney. There was a never-ending cycle of news coming through and you had to work really hard to put it out of your mind and remain as professional as possible.”

“The night before the Lord’s game I was out for dinner with Paul Collingwood in London. We got a call from the captain saying we needed to go back to the team hotel.  There we were sat in this lovely restaurant and our first thought was “I’m just fed up with this now, it’s ****ing me off”. It was just going on and on.”

“We got back to the hotel. We were the fifth or sixth in the team room. Trotty, Straussy and Ravi Bopara were already there. KP [Kevin Pietersen] had had to drive in from home. Ijaz Butt had said something like “Pakistan aren’t cheating, it’s England that are cheating.”

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“Our playing hierarchy — coaches, captain — rightly felt this was the final straw. It was ridiculous. We’d been bowled out cheaply at The Oval with Umar Gul swinging it around corners and their chairman accused us of cheating.”

“A lot of our senior players at the time — of which I wasn’t one — were adamant we should pull out of the series and that Pakistan had to go home. I’m quite an emotional guy and I agreed with it. How could they call us cheats after everything that had gone on? A lot of our players were being booed by the Pakistan fans.”

“In fact, I can’t remember a single player in the room who didn’t want to pull out. We were all incredibly frustrated. But our bosses talked about not wanting to let England’s fans down and other reasons behind it. We were acting very emotionally rather than logically. We got on with it.”

It was just days later, in the nets at Lord’s before a game England’s players did not want to play in, when Trott — who had shared a record 332-run eighth-wicket stand with Broad during the Lord’s Test 24 days earlier — became embroiled in the ugly altercation with Pakistan fast bowler Riaz, who will spearhead Pakistan’s attack in this series alongside Amir.

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To the fury of England’s players, Trott was subsequently made to apologise in person.

“Trotty was in the nets at the Nursery End at Lord’s and Wahab said something to him. Trotty had been staring at Wahab. Trotty’s an emotional guy as well and he’d scored a hundred in that Lord’s Test match. Wahab didn’t take too kindly to the way Trotty was looking at him and something sparked off.”

“Something was said by Wahab which Trotty took huge offence to and he ended up whacking Wahab with his pad and [former England batting coach] Graham Gooch had had to split them up.”

“From what I can remember, Trotty had to apologise to Wahab, Waqar [Younis, the coach] and the match referee. Imagine Andy Flower telling Jonathan Trott he had to go and apologise. It was the right thing to do but after everything that had gone on, it was an exceptionally emotional time.”

Without the three banned Pakistani players, the two subsequent series between the sides, both of which Pakistan have won in the UAE, have been played in relatively good spirits.

Stuart Broad does not envisage that changing in the upcoming four-Test Investec series in England, the first time Pakistan have played Tests here since 2010 and the first time one of the banned trio has faced them.

‘In Amir’s case I certainly have no hard feelings about playing against him again,’ said Broad. ‘What he did was wrong but he was extremely young and maybe not aware of the consequences. The reality is he’s back in the game and has served his time.

‘I have a little bit of sympathy for Amir but once you’ve received money to do something illegal that is always a bad thing. We are very well-educated by the ICC’s anti-corruption unit, but at 18 years old you are potentially more vulnerable and susceptible to your elders.

‘I am strongly of the view that one of the only ways we will ever expel this awful disease [match-fixing] from our game is to hand out lifetime bans for any kind of fixing.

‘As an 18-year-old if you know the punishment is a lifetime ban from anything to do with cricket — playing, coaching, anything — that should be it. It would be a very scary thought. The only way to get rid of it is to introduce lifetime bans for any form of fixing.’