Posted by Those following the court case involving Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif will have seen a lot of eye-catching headlines. The agent at the centre of all this is Mazhar Majeed. He is, frankly, a bit of a knobhead.
The thing is, most of the headlines derive from things Majeed said when he was boasting to undercover News of the World reporters. When he said that Wasim and Waqar took payments to fix events in cricket matches, he wasn’t saying he was directly involved, he was just saying ‘this kind of thing happens’ and then he lists some famous names to make it sound more normal. The reference to Australians is another attempt to make the practice sound more common that it probably was.
Maybe there is something in it. Maybe Ricky Ponting regularly bats out maidens and pockets some cash for his troubles. Maybe Wasim and Waqar deliberately underperformed in every match they played (ponder that for a moment). The thing is, thus far the evidence amounts to the idle words of a knobhead and we’re not going to get too worked up until there’s something more than that.
I loathe the way the press turn a dodgy character’s boasts to a potential punter into headlined accusations of malfeasance.
That was more succinct than what we said.
But we used the word ‘knobhead’ twice, so the article does have something going for it.
Have you got hold of the wrong knobhead here o king (metaphorically speaking)? Mahmood/Mahjid?
Yes, we have. Thanks for pointing that out. We’ve updated the article.
I am still fascinated by the Pakistani cricketers being paid in peanuts
A knobhead agent? As-if one butt wasn’t enough.
Tell me that’s not clever.
‘the evidence amounts to the idle words of a knobhead’
That’s an enjoyable line. I’m going to use it in conversation.
It’s worth getting a law degree and becoming a barrister just for the opportunity:
“…and furthermore, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, I put it to you that the evidence provided by the Prosecution amounts to little more than the idle words of a knobhead. The Defence rests, Your Honour.”
As Bert says, the prosecution are basing their case around this ‘knobhead’, it’s not just some rumours in the press.
He’s quite a smart knobhead though. He has claimed (from what I gather) that Ijaz Butt took a rifle up onto a certain woody knoll in Dallas, that Mrs. Bhutto was in fact Imran Khan in disguise and that he has a holiday home on the moon. Thus if he was ever caught on tape fixing cricket matches his defence could claim his words were “little more than idle words of a knobhead.”
mazhar majid it seems is just trying to save the Pakistani cricketers from the tag of the “only match fixers” in world cricket.