Cricket fans should take little pleasure in the sentences handed out to disgraced Pakistan cricketers Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir over match-fixing in London today.

Yes, we can doff our caps to the Crown Prosecution Service for their handling of the investigation and let us not forget the sterling work by the now defunct News of the World in getting the ball rolling. (The ICC will be quick to claim credit but in truth they have done precious little and have been mere spectators for the duration of this trial. This is in keeping with the toothless nature of the organisation).

But today’s events in court are a hollow victory for those faceless victims who make this great game what it is – the fans. Butt, Asif and Amir have failed not only themselves but the millions of adoring supporters who idolise the very ground they walk on.

Spare a thought for young Amir, who was just 18 when he deliberately bowled those infamous no-balls. Taken in the context of a lifetime of earnings, sponsorships and endorsements, you have to wonder why a professional cricketer would risk his career for an alleged fee of “just £2000”. Amir must earn peanuts for him to even consider throwing his life away for that paltry sum.

Perhaps the ICC could provide sports journalists with a rough idea what sort of income young men in all the cricket playing nations can expect to earn at the start of their careers. One would aver that Pakistani cricketers would be somewhere near the bottom of that list.

The trial also leaves many unanswered questions – such as the apparent involvement of other members of the Pakistan team in this skulduggery.

A final though - regular readers of this blog (all three of you) will note an earlier post about Hansie Cronje. Wonder what sentence he would have received if he was in the dock in London today.

At a time when 50-over cricket is under threat from the more glamorous 20-20 format, you would think the ICC would do everything it can to bolster the image of the Cricket World Cup.

Why then would they stretch the event - being hosted by India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh- over 43 days? It’s madness. There are several days where just one match is being played. Yes, it must be a logistical nightmare having to move players, officials and equipment around three countries, but you get the feeling the host broadcasters called the shots on the scheduling to suit lucrative TV advertising markets.

The ICC needs to tread carefully. Cricket is still suffering from the latest sorry saga involving alleged match-fixing by three Pakistan cricketers. Now we are told a mere 4000 tickets will go on sale to the general public for the showpiece final on April 2 at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, due to “commercial” reasons – in other words, sponsors and business partners get first preference.

The irony is that Test cricket, once-believed to be under threat from shorter versions of the sport, is flourishing, with talk of a league system gaining credibility.

Purists of the game would hate to see one day international cricket fading because officials at the ICC are too narrow-minded to act decisively.

I will never forget the day. April 7 2000. Lost in the sands of time now. I was on the sports desk of the Sunday Tribune in Durban.

A story flashed up on the news wires. It implicated national cricket captain Hansie Cronje in a match-fixing scandal. I was filled with many conflicting emotions - but primarily I was angry that a man of Hansie's moral fibre could ever be accused by those cheeky Indians of bringing the sport we so loved into disrepute. You see, I never, for one moment, believed he was actually guilty of these claims. I was outraged and defended Hansie's  honour with vim and vigour.

Fast forward a few months, and, or course, I had to swallow my words. Cricket lost its innocence and Hansie brought the sport to its knees. It took years before I was able to watch a match without thinking what everyone else was. By the time the 2003 Cricket World Cup arrived in South Africa, my faith in cricket had recovered sufficiently and I was able to cover the event without the kind of searing cynicism that I had resorted to so many times over the previous three years.

Today's shocking revelations by the News of the World have brought back some horrible memories. It is hard to imagine how Pakistan cricket will ever recover from this. Yes, the players concerned are "innocent until proven guilty"... But the evidence is damning.

The rest of the series against England must now surely be called into doubt. Indeed, the Test match at Lord's should probably have been abandoned. But too many people with too many vested interests decided it was business as usual. For what it's worth, I won't be watching any cricket involving Pakistan until some answers are provided. This is indeed a dark, dark, day for cricket. Again.

As my interest starts to wane on day six of the Winter Olympics, I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about the event that makes me tune out every four years, at around the same time.

And I think I’ve finally nailed it: most of the competitors almost always look like they were spoilt, upper class kids who took skiing holidays in the Alps.

Basically, it’s all just a bit too posh for my liking. The poster boys and girls don’t look like they have suffered much for their craft. And that troubles me.

The UK Olympics minister Tessa Jowell almost added a bit of spice when she rushed to the defence of the hosts following a string of embarrassing faux pas. But what promised to be a welcome distraction quickly turned into empty rhetoric and cheap shots at an easy target, i.e. the media.

The thing about the summer Olympics is that you can watch an impoverished, barefoot, Kenyan athlete, who has never seen snow, let alone gone snowboarding on it, running his heart out against opposition from far more affluent backgrounds.

Sport is supposed to be the great leveller, isn’t it? It is meant to transcend all man-made boundaries. This is hardly ever in great evidence at the Winter Olympics.

Fables about the success of Jamaican bob-sled teams may work well on celluloid, but a glance at the Vancouver medal table tells a different story in real life. Sports fans love a tear-jerker about how an athlete triumphed against adversity; they also like their heroes to have an edge, and, yes, they even like them a little bit flawed.

Competitors who appear to be pure as the driven snow are just not interesting.

As the clock counts down towards the showpiece of global football in June, a smaller but no less important tournament is being largely overshadowed. Durban, my birthplace, plays host to the inaugural Street Child World Cup next month.

The publicity blurb says, “Street children from nine countries will come together to play football and find their voices through the game they love.”

In a month when South Africans have remained polarised by the shameful actions of controversial president Jacob Zuma, it is apt that such an event now presents itself; people can focus their emotional energy on a cause that is far more worthy than those of a pathologically deviant politician with no scruples.

Zuma and his fattened cronies have not just failed the millions of South Africans who are living in squalour but also the thousands of street kids who are forced to sleep in the dirt and feed off scraps. Over the years, authorities have chosen to deal with the street children "problem" in a barbaric and often heavy-handed manner. In Durban, for example, when there are major international sports events (such as the Rugby or Cricket World Cup) and the planet’s eyes are on the city, the police round up the street kids at midnight a few days before an event in large lorries. They then drive the children well out of the urban centres - this repatriation job is done at midnight so nosey citizens will not see what is happening.

The cops dump the kids on the outskirts of the city limits. By the time the children manage to walk/hitch their way back to the city (which is the only place they realistically have a chance of surviving on the streets), the major international event is over, the world does not know of the "problem" and they are rendered "invisible". The cops deny they do this but everyone knows – I spoke to someone in the UK yesterday who will be doing voluntary work at the Street Child World Cup and he told me he has seen photographic evidence to support these claims. The media have interviewed street kids and the people who work with them, they all tell the same story.

 
These children are vulnerable to all kinds of abuse but the other side of the coin is that they sniff glue or petrol to still their hunger pangs so they are often violent as a result - packs of street urchins maraud through the streets at night in Durban and have been known to attack people and in rare instances, kill them. I am not kidding.
Cops in central Cape Town probably do the same thing there as it is a major tourist hotspot (though not one of my favourites). Apparently, it is not an issue in Joburg because the city centre is so unbelievably dangerous that it is quite out of bounds to visitors - so street kids are left to their own devices.

But these things appear to go unspoken in Africa's largest democracy and wealthiest nation as the euphoria builds towards the World Cup.

So John Terry has been sacked as England captain.

I do think that the role of captain on a football field is grossly overestimated. Aside from calling head/tails or choosing a side to play towards, most of what a captain does is largely ceremonial. Even the wearing of the armband is a mockery because EVERYONE seems to address the referee these days. The only major role a captain plays is fronting press conferences - and that is OFF THE FIELD. The same story with rugby... All you need is a semi-literate mug to spout out the usual "game of two halves" and "the lads done well" rubbish to the mass media...

 At least in cricket, the capt has to make strategic decisions virtually every minute, calls which can make or break a game, from the toss to the final delivery. In top level football, the players know what they need to do - they don't need a captain to tell them how to play or what tactics to employ, the manager shouts this out to them at half-time and also during the match from the technical area.

Bottom line: There is no aura around JT or the role of captain, like many fans imagine it. He is just another lying, cheating, scumbag. He does not deserve to lead England at the World Cup - or ever again, for that matter.

Who the hell does Colin Montgomerie think he is? His latest tirade has been launched at Ernie Els, who is forced to miss the season-ending Volvo Masters at Valderrama, due to commitments he made to play in the Asian Tour in Singapore.

Okay, so Els leads the European Order of Merit and it would have been great if he could have made the prestigious Volvo event, Europe's flagship tournament. But Els is a man of his word as he signed a contract to play in Asia. He did not want to go back on his promise.

Monty, on the other hand, is a has-been, well past his prime (more like prime rib if you look at his ever expanding gut) and clearly still suffering the after-effects of his wife leaving him. He even verbally attacked Ryder Cup captain Nick Faldo after Faldo leaked a story about the Scot's poor performance in the Seve Trophy in Ireland. Apparently Montgomerie "had failed to turn up for team meetings" leading Faldo to question "his commitment to the event".

Here's some advice Colin: deal with your own messed up life before you start making enemies of fellow players. You may find they are your only friends.