Who honestly suspected foul play was at hand when the precociously talented 18 year old pace bowler Mohammad Amir, arguably Pakistan’s best player during the recent test series between his nation and England, and his team mate Mohammad Asif bowled 3 seemingly innocuous no-balls during the Fourth test match at Lords. I certainly didn’t, the England team didn’t and neither did the millions of people watching across the world. I mean it was just a few no-balls, no big deal, it happens in every cricket match without any fuss. I batted the thought away as quickly as I had seen it with my faith in the honesty and professionalism of sport still intact.

The only problem was that this time it was a big deal and what has followed since must be classed as some of the most shocking revelations in sport in recent times, and as such will sadly question the integrity of what is known as the “gentlemen’s game”.

Revelations in the News of the World newspaper have revealed that Amir and Asif, along with their captain Salman Butt, have been linked to a betting scam known as “spot-fixing”, the betting on seemingly irrelevant events within a cricket match such as for example the number of no-balls bowled or the number of balls it takes to reach a certain score.

The newspaper claims that it paid a so-called middle man known as Mahzar Majeed £150,000 for information on the exact times these no-balls would be bowled and thus according to them prove the game was rigged. Majeed went on to identify captain Butt as the ringleader of this supposed scam, claiming that the players involved would receive large amounts of money for their actions, therefore putting money before any sporting achievement.

So the International Cricket Council is once again forced to delve into the murky waters of scandal and potentially even match fixing, not seen since the first ever high profile case of a betting scandal in cricket, following the Hansie Cronje match –fixing scandal in 2000 which resulted in a life-time ban for the former South African captain.

The issue of betting scandals isn’t exclusively attached to cricket either, when former Premier League footballer Matt Le Tissier in 2009 admitted he was part of football betting scam during a match in 1995. The former Southampton player attempted to kick the ball out of play within the first minute in order to receive £10,000 as part of a deal with friends and a team-mate, however the scam failed as Le Tissier did not kick the ball hard enough for the ball to go out of play.

Or even in horse-racing when Kieren Fallon, one of the most successful jockeys in recent years had to face allegations of race fixing when he remarkably failed to win a race at Lingfield Park despite having a massive lead going into the final straight before slowing down enough for one of his rivals to over-take him just before the finish line. Fallon was later acquitted of these race-fixing allegations due to a lack of evidence.

What is most concerning however is that the integrity of almost every sport will be questioned and even now I can think of events in the past in different sports that make me wonder if there was some darker influence at work, all of those shocking misses in football, easy dropped catches in cricket or a sudden and dramatic drop in form in tennis or golf... a week ago I wouldn’t have thought twice about events like these, but now, I can’t help but question them.

If in the following days, once we get past all of the meetings and investigations by a plethora of cricketing and Pakistani organisations, the aforementioned players in question are found guilty of these accusations; then it is a massive betrayal of their sport, as well as their cricket-mad homeland, adding to the already monumental problems that have resulted from the recent floods in the country and as much as it would sadden me to see it, I hope the ICC have the courage to throw the book at the players in question in order to show that cheating and fraud will not prevail in cricket and sport in general.

Otherwise there is an increasing danger that sport will be overshadowed by further examples of greed and selfishness.