Corruption here too!
THE only word that comes to mind is "shame." We did get only a few things to be proud about and one of them was cricket. I sadly had to use "was" because of the recent disclosure of the darkest chapter of BD cricket. It never occurred to me that our brothers could actually be involved with spot and match fixing. All other issues such as poor performance can be endured but this sort of allegations simply broke the hearts of millions of BD cricket fans.
And the spot fixing allegations involved Mohammed Ashraful who was considered as one of the most talented cricketers the nation has seen till now. Not only him, there are talks about some other former players who once served the nation and repeatedly gave us moments of happiness. But now with these facts gradually coming under the spotlight almost no respect is left for them.
The way Dhaka Gladiators authority insisted players to play fixed matches by threatening them with salary simply left me dumbfounded thinking of how people can scoop so low just for money.
Even if the situation was extremely adverse, our cricketers should not have done this absolutely unacceptable treachery. And the confession of Mohammed Ashraful proves that spot fixing took root in our cricket long since taking advantage of our ignorance.
Whenever I used to talk about this issue naturally "Pakistan," "India" and other nations came in my conversation but never did I think about the Tigers. Because I had the firm conviction that we might not be able to play like the top class nations but we indeed got one thing running in our vein called "honesty."
We are a struggling nation with natural and manmade disasters, corruption, political and social unrest crumbling our hopes and dreams. We had cricket to trigger our unity and enthusiasm, to make us stand again with heads held high. So we cannot let corruption enter into our cricket arena.
Let us respect cricket as a game rather than think of it as a way of making money. Hope the guilty gets the deserved punishment and the spirit of honesty be voiced everywhere in every aspect of our beloved motherland.
We indeed want to feel proud of the Tigers' achievement of course attained through honesty upholding the true spirit of the game.
The writer is a class XI student.
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