Shahid Afridi reveals how he helped unearth the 2010 spot-fixing scandal

In September 2010, the ICC suspended three Pakistan players - Mohammad Amir, Mohammad Asif and Salman Butt - on allegations of spot-fixing. As per ICC’s independent investigation, the players were alleged to have carried out specific on-field actions, including bowling no-balls at predetermined times during the Lord's Test against England on the instance of a Pakistani bookie Mazhar Majeed, who was travelling with the team during the scandal. Afridi revealed the story.

“I was in Sri Lanka on a tour when the text messages of Mazhar Majeed - Salman Butt's 'agent and manager', who was also prosecuted - reached me, in transcript form. It is pure coincidence how I got a hold of them. And it's got something to do with a kid, a beach and a repairman,” Afridi wrote in his auto-biography.

“See, before the Sri Lanka tour, Majeed and his family had joined the cricket team during the championship. At one of the Sri Lankan beaches, Majeed's young son dropped his father's mobile phone in the water and it stopped working. When Majeed went back to England, he took his phone for repair to a mobile fix-it. The phone stayed at the shop for days. In a random coincidence, the shop owner turned out to be a friend of a friend of mine (this may sound like too much of a coincidence but the Pakistani community in England is quite closely connected). 

“While fixing the phone, the shop-owner, who was asked to retrieve the messages, came across Majeed's messages to the players of the Pakistan team. Though he shouldn't have seen what he did, it was that leak from him to my friend and a few others (whom I won't name) that looped me in on the scam. Soon, word got around that something strange was happening with the cricket team. It was that leak which probably tipped off the reporting team from News of the World as well. It was sheer coincidence: a Pakistani repairman in London who couldn't keep his eyes and mouth shut about a broken cellphone from Sri Lanka. But I'm not surprised: when God has to execute justice, it happens in the most unexpected ways.”

Afridi further added that he informed the team management about this, but sadly, Waqar Younis, the team’s coach back then, didn’t escalate and took it lightly. 

“When I received those messages back in Sri Lanka, I showed them to Waqar Younis, then coach of the team. Unfortunately, he didn't escalate the matter and take it upstairs. Both Waqar and I thought it was something that would go away, something that wasn't as bad as it looked, just a dodgy conversation between the players and Majeed, at worst. But the messages weren't harmless banter - they were part of something larger, which the world would soon discover,” the Pakistani legend further added.