Not life and death. Just Amir tragedy...

For those who relish criminal trials involving photogenic, polarising brunettes, it’s shaping up to be a bumper week. It is, of course, rather base and untenable to draw comparisons between the cases of Amanda Knox and Mohammad Amir, but one’s mind twirls its fetid cogs in dubious circles so that’s what has happened. With all deference to the unimaginable horror of what the Kerchers are still left to deal with, I’m pleased Knox walked free. Pleased because I thought the evidence as I’ve garnered it was ropey and was presented by a chief prosecutor whose alleged character and previous conduct could at best be described as questionable if you read up anything about why he himself will be in the dock come November. The leering sub-editor prurience and pious vilification of her for having a sex and social life was another factor, along with a lack of motive beyond that teenagers who smoke pot and like shagging are more than likely potential murderers and rapists. The whole titillatingly misogynistic ‘Foxy Knoxy’ bullshit wanked out by wheezing men across the planet did a great deal to sustain that one part of the case that has had relatively little scrutiny. The other, and rather less reasoned part of why I was pleased is a blinkered desire to not want to accept that someone as young and, wheeze, attractive could be capable of doing something so horrific. And that’s where today’s developments at Southwark Crown Court come into it.

Although this criminal case into last year’s spot-fixing scandal is based only around the relative trivialities of money and cricket rather than a tragic and appalling death, my flawed application of non-belief to someone’s capacity for wrong-doing because of their youth and aesthetic appeal can be applied to Mohammad Amir just as equally as Amanda Knox. I hope it’s just me, but cynicism is one of the most debilitating lenses of age, even when that age isn’t so great that you didn’t cross existences with Elvis. You find it increasingly difficult to take off your curmudgeon-tinted spectacles and see some of the world’s pleasantness amidst the compost, so when you do see something that genuinely makes your pupils light up your life in a flash of magnificence you really do want to cherish it. This was how I felt watching Amir bowl up until the summer of 2010 as he tore through batting line-ups in both forms of the game, gliding in with the grace of Nureyev and the mane of Red Rum as everyone began to forget fast bowling’s previously fallow few years. Seeing him wind up banned from cricket and in a criminal court may well be a victory for justice, but it’s also a triumph for seeing the world as a massive, honking chemical toilet that’s been tipped on its side at a festival Evanescence are headlining.

The evidence against Amir – certainly as already interpreted by the ICC in handing down their five year ban – looks substantially more damning than that presented in Italy and attempts to mitigate his actions by reference to his youth and upbringing have been dismissed as naive and patronising respectively. I don’t know any more than anyone else about the webs of wads and pressures that may have led him to where he is today, but there are legions of players from similar backgrounds who have not succumbed to temptation so the being from a small, remote village argument does seem rather tenuous. His age – he had just turned eighteen at the time of the alleged crimes – and role as a perpetrator rather than an instigator has always seemed to me more of a valid consideration in terms of his punishment, but you will find little in the way of support for that point of view from within the game.

It’s quite likely we’ll see Amir bowling on one of cricket’s biggest stages again within the next few years. Even if Pakistan’s national set-up resist the temptation to bring him back into the fold, the idea that a T20 franchise somewhere in the world won’t is even naiver than Amir himself has been. It will be pay-per-view box office of the Christians and lions variety, but watching him charge in again won’t fill me with much joy even if he donates any fee he ever earns to UNICEF. However much I want to wish away what has happened because I swooned at his inswinger, the damage is irrevocably done. From Gujjar Khan to Perugia and Lord’s to Seattle, tardy old redemption always trots in a very poor second to the consequences of someone’s original sin.