The video that dragged 2010 back into 2026
On October 7, 2026 — just last week — a short training video started doing the rounds on Pakistani social media. Nothing dramatic in it. Mohammad Amir, 34 now, bowling in the nets in Pakistan. A short run-up. Twice he overstepped. Twice the front foot landed a good distance past the crease.
And the comments section exploded. Not because the no-balls were big, but because of who Amir was training with: Salman Butt.
Read those two names together and if you follow Pakistan cricket, your stomach drops a little. Because sixteen years ago, those two names — plus a third, Mohammad Asif — sat at the centre of the darkest week in Pakistan cricket's history. The 2010 Lord's spot-fixing scandal. The scandal that ended with three Pakistan internationals in prison, an agent in jail, and a sport staring at its own reflection and not liking what it saw.
This is the first article in our Cricket Mega Scandals series, and I wanted to start here — because no scandal in cricket history was caught quite so red-handed, punished quite so publicly, or debated quite so bitterly ever since. I remember where I was when the News of the World story broke. Most Pakistan fans my age do. It felt like a death in the family. Sixteen years later, the questions it raised have never fully gone away: how could our best young bowler throw it all away at 18? Why did one of the three get a hero's welcome back while the other two vanished? And did the punishment actually fix anything?
Let me take you through the whole story — what happened, the evidence, the trial, the fallout, and where everyone is now. Only verified facts. This story doesn't need exaggeration.
Lord's Cricket Ground, London — the venue of the 4th Test, August 26–29, 2010. Photo: PaddyBriggs, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
What happened: a tabloid, a fixer, and £150,000 in a hotel room
To understand the scandal, you have to understand the summer of 2010. Pakistan were touring England, and the tour was already a mess. Shahid Afridi had been made Test captain in May, lost the first Test against Australia at Lord's in July, and promptly resigned. The PCB handed the Test captaincy to Salman Butt — a 25-year-old opener, elegant, well-spoken, the respectable face of the team.
The team itself was a strange mix: fading seniors, raw teenagers, and in the middle of it, the most exciting young fast bowler in world cricket. Mohammad Amir was 18 years old that summer and already taking wickets for fun in English conditions. Mohammad Asif, 27, was the crafty one — the bowler English batsmen privately admitted they hated facing because he made the ball talk at 130 kph.
What nobody in the stands knew was that a British tabloid, the News of the World, had spent weeks working an undercover operation. Their man was Mazher Mahmood, the paper's famous "fake sheikh" — a reporter who posed as a wealthy front man for a betting syndicate. His target: Mazhar Majeed, a 35-year-old London-based sports agent with close ties to several Pakistan players. The Pakistan team management had actually warned the players not to associate with Majeed or his brother. The players associated with him anyway.
In a London hotel room, with a hidden camera rolling, Mahmood counted out £150,000 in cash — about $232,665 at the time — and handed it to Majeed. In exchange, Majeed made promises. Specific, checkable, almost cinematic promises: that Pakistan's bowlers would bowl no-balls at exact, pre-decided moments during the fourth Test at Lord's, then underway.
He told the undercover reporter that Mohammad Amir would bowl the third over of England's innings, and that the first ball of that over would be a no-ball. He predicted that the sixth ball of the tenth over — to be bowled by Mohammad Asif — would also be a no-ball. A cricket statistician later calculated the odds of anyone predicting those exact no-balls by pure chance at 1.5 million to one.
On Saturday, August 28, 2010, the News of the World published the story with the video. By that evening, Scotland Yard had arrested Majeed on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud bookmakers. Detectives interviewed Butt, Amir and Asif. The next day, Pakistan completed their defeat — England won by an innings and 225 runs, taking the series 3–1 — in a match nobody was really watching for the cricket anymore.
The warning signs nobody heeded
Here is the detail that angers me most when I revisit this story: cricket's authorities had been warned. In July 2010, a month before the Lord's Test, the ICC's Anti-Corruption and Security Unit served formal notices on two unnamed Pakistan players, seeking information about spot and match-fixing allegations. The notices followed the first Test of that England series at Nottingham and gave the players 14 days to respond. Whatever came of those notices, it wasn't enough to stop what happened at Lord's five weeks later.
The team management, for its part, had warned the players to stay away from Mazhar Majeed and his brother — the players had been told explicitly not to associate with him or let agents into their rooms. They ignored the warning. Majeed was in their orbit throughout the tour, and nobody with authority over the squad stopped it.
And the sport itself had been here before. Ten years earlier, the Hansie Cronje tapes had exposed South Africa's captain taking bookie money, and cricket had promised "never again" — new anti-corruption units, new codes, new education programmes. A decade later, at the self-styled Home of Cricket, a fixer was pricing Test matches at £1 million like it was a normal Tuesday. The system hadn't failed to see the problem. It had failed to act on what it saw. That distinction matters, because it repeats in almost every scandal this series will cover.
The no-balls: caught on camera, in front of millions
Here is the thing that made this scandal different from every fixing allegation before it. Usually, fixing lives in the shadows — a dropped catch here, a slow over-rate there, things you can argue about forever. This was the opposite. Majeed's predictions were broadcast-quality specific, and the bowlers delivered them on live television.
Amir ran in for the third over. First ball — a massive overstep. Commentators called it an "enormous no-ball, good half a metre over the line." For an 18-year-old who had been landing it on a coin all summer, it was bizarre. Then Asif, tenth over, sixth ball — another clear no-ball, exactly as ordered.
Majeed had actually been paid for three no-balls. The third never happened — play was stopped by bad light and rain before it could be bowled. (The fixer later rang the reporter to promise the third one would come from Amir on the third ball of the third over — a detail that tells you how routine this had become for him.)
But the video contained worse than no-balls. Majeed, counting the cash, boasted on camera that he had been fixing matches for two and a half years, that he had seven Pakistan players working for him, and that he had made "masses and masses of money." He named four on the tape: Amir, Asif, captain Salman Butt, and wicketkeeper Kamran Akmal. Three more he refused to name on camera. He priced his services like a menu: £50,000 to £80,000 to fix a "bracket" (a passage of play that punters bet on), £1 million to rig the result of a full Test match.
Within days, the ICC charged Butt, Amir and Asif under its anti-corruption code and provisionally suspended all three. On September 2, 2010, they were dropped from the Twenty20 leg of the tour. The PCB suspended their contracts in November. The criminal file went to the Crown Prosecution Service. There was no coming back from this through the usual channels of denial and delay.
Mohammad Amir in the outfield against England, August 2010 — one week before the Lord's Test. Photo: Wonker, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
What the scorecard hides
Lost in the scandal is the fact that the Lord's Test itself was extraordinary — one of the strangest matches ever played at the ground. Pakistan won the toss and bowled, and for a while it looked like a masterstroke. Amir ripped through England's top order: Cook, Pietersen, Collingwood, Morgan, Prior, Swann — 6 for 84, and in the process the 18-year-old became the youngest bowler in history to reach 50 Test wickets. England were 102 for 7. The fix was supposedly on, and Pakistan were still dominating. That contradiction — genuine brilliance and corruption in the same spell — is what makes this story so hard to process.
Then came the partnership that broke the game: Jonathan Trott (184) and Stuart Broad (169) put on 332 for the eighth wicket, a world record at the time, dragging England to 446. Pakistan's reply was a catastrophe — 74 all out, Graeme Swann taking 4 for 12, the whole innings lasting 150 minutes. Forced to follow on, they made 147, with only Umar Akmal's defiant 79 not out offering resistance. England won by an innings and 225 runs — Pakistan's heaviest Test defeat at that point.
And here is the detail that still stops me cold: at the series presentation, Mohammad Amir was named Pakistan's Player of the Series. Nineteen wickets in the series. The award was for the same weeks in which he was bowling no-balls to order. He collected the honour while the Scotland Yard investigation was already underway. If you want one image that captures the whole rotten absurdity of that summer, it's that: an 18-year-old being applauded as his team's best player, days before being charged as a criminal.
The men at the centre of it
Salman Butt was the captain, and in the prosecution's telling, the orchestrator alongside Majeed. Educated, articulate, from a good Lahore family — he was supposed to be the safe pair of hands after the Afridi chaos. At the criminal trial, the court heard that the spot-fixing plot was orchestrated by Butt and Majeed together. He pleaded not guilty and fought the case all the way. He was 25, at the peak of his powers as a Test opener, and he threw it away for money he didn't need. That is the part I have never been able to get my head around.
Mohammad Asif was the genius who never seemed to care. Ask English batsmen from that era and they'll tell you: Asif was the hardest bowler Pakistan had, not the fastest, the smartest. Seam, swing, patience. He also pleaded not guilty and fought the charges. Of the three, his fall feels the quietest and maybe the saddest — a once-in-a-generation skill, just... gone.
Mohammad Amir was the tragedy. Eighteen years old. A left-armer who swung it both ways at pace, who had the cricket world at his feet. When the story broke, plenty of us told ourselves he must have been pressured, misled, trapped by older men. The courts saw it differently — he was old enough to know — but his age shaped everything that came after. Unlike the other two, Amir eventually pleaded guilty. That single decision changed his life's trajectory completely.
Mazhar Majeed, the agent, was the only non-player in the dock and in many ways the most revealing figure. His hotel-room performance — the casual pricing, the seven players, the two and a half years — suggested a fixing system, not a one-off lapse. Cricket got its convictions. Whether it dismantled the system is a question the sport is still living with.
Pakistan team huddle from that era — Amir and Kamran Akmal (both named in Majeed's allegations) in the same frame. File photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
The trials: banned by cricket, then jailed by England
What followed was a two-track punishment — sporting and criminal — and both were severe.
The ICC tribunal sat in Doha, Qatar. After hearings in January 2011, judgment came on February 5, 2011. All three were found guilty of corruption under the ICC's anti-corruption code:
- Salman Butt — 10 years, with five suspended
- Mohammad Asif — 7 years, with two suspended
- Mohammad Amir — 5 years, no suspension
In effect, none of the three could play official, sanctioned cricket until September 2, 2015. The tribunal's message was blunt: the captain got the heaviest ban, the teenager the lightest, but nobody walked away.
The criminal case was the part that truly shocked the sport. In February 2011, British prosecutors charged all four men with conspiracy to cheat at gambling and conspiracy to accept corrupt payments. On September 16, 2011, Amir pleaded guilty at a pre-trial hearing — but the plea was kept secret until his teammates' trial ended, so the jury wouldn't be prejudiced.
The trial of Butt and Asif ran from October 5 to November 1, 2011 at Southwark Crown Court in London. Both pleaded not guilty. The prosecutor told the jury the case revealed "a depressing tale of rampant corruption at the heart of international cricket." On November 1, the jury convicted both men — of conspiracy to cheat and conspiracy to accept corrupt payments.
Sentencing came on November 3, 2011:
- Salman Butt — 30 months in prison
- Mohammad Asif — 12 months in prison
- Mohammad Amir — 6 months in a young offenders institution
- Mazhar Majeed — 32 months in prison
Let that sink in. A Test captain, in prison. An 18-year-old fast bowler, in a young offenders institution (Amir served about three months at Portland and was released in February 2012). These were the first prison sentences ever handed to Test cricketers for fixing. The sport had talked about corruption for a decade — since the Cronje tapes of 2000 — but it had never put anyone in a cell. Now it had.
Southwark Crown Court, London — where the verdicts were delivered on November 1, 2011 and sentences on November 3. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
The scandal at a glance — key dates
- July 2010 — ICC anti-corruption unit serves notices on two unnamed Pakistan players after the Nottingham Test
- August 26–29, 2010 — 4th Test, Lord's: England beat Pakistan by an innings and 225 runs
- August 28, 2010 — News of the World publishes the sting; Majeed arrested; players interviewed by Scotland Yard
- September 2, 2010 — Butt, Asif, Amir dropped from the T20s; ICC charges and provisionally suspends all three
- February 5, 2011 — ICC tribunal in Doha: 10, 7 and 5-year bans
- September 16, 2011 — Amir pleads guilty (kept secret until the trial ends)
- October 5 – November 1, 2011 — Southwark Crown Court trial; Butt and Asif convicted November 1
- November 3, 2011 — Sentences: Butt 30 months, Asif 12 months, Amir 6 months, Majeed 32 months
- September 2, 2015 — bans expire
- January 2016 — Amir returns to international cricket; June 2017 — his 3/16 wins Pakistan the Champions Trophy final
- October 7, 2026 — the training video with Butt goes viral, and the whole story comes flooding back
The fallout: three careers, three different endings
The bans expired on September 2, 2015. What happened next is the part of this story that still divides Pakistani fans — because the three men were not treated equally, and the reasons are uncomfortable.
Amir came back. He had pleaded guilty early, which mattered legally and morally. The PCB — to its credit or its opportunism, depending on your view — backed his return. In January 2015 the ICC amended its anti-corruption code to allow banned players back into domestic cricket before their bans fully expired, a change widely seen as tailored for Amir. He returned to international cricket in January 2016, in the T20I series in New Zealand. Then came the fairy-tale chapter: a comeback Test at Lord's itself in July 2016, and then the 2017 Champions Trophy final, where his devastating opening spell — 3 for 16 — blew away India's top order and won Pakistan the trophy. For a while, it felt like redemption was real.
Butt fought and lost. He took his case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport; it was dismissed in April 2013. He finally admitted his guilt in June 2015 — five years after the event, which for many fans was five years too late. He never played for Pakistan again.
Asif confessed and apologised in April 2013. It changed nothing. He never played for Pakistan again either, and drifted out of the game entirely.
I'll be honest about my own view here, because this series is supposed to carry my analysis, not just the record. The asymmetry bothers me. Yes — Amir was 18, he pleaded guilty, he cooperated, and the law treats youth and remorse as mitigating factors. All of that is legitimate. But I also can't pretend the PCB didn't need a world-class left-armer more than it needed a 30-something opener and a 32-year-old seamer. Need is a powerful solvent for principle. Pakistan cricket forgave the player it couldn't replace, and forgot the two it could. You can call that pragmatism. You can call it something uglier. I've gone back and forth for years, and I still haven't settled it.
What the scandal did change structurally: the ICC's anti-corruption unit got sharper teeth and a bigger budget, player education on fixing became mandatory rather than decorative, and the idea that a fixer could operate with impunity around an international team became — at least for a while — harder to sustain. Whether the fixers simply got smarter instead is a question for another article in this series. (The IPL 2013 case, coming up next, suggests they did.)
Mohammad Asif — seven-year ICC ban (two suspended), twelve months in prison. Never played for Pakistan again. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Where they are now (October 2026)
Mohammad Amir got the redemption arc — and then some. After his January 2016 return, the defining night came at The Oval on June 18, 2017: the Champions Trophy final against India. Pakistan had been thrashed by India in the group stage; nobody gave them a chance. Amir, who had missed the semi-final against England with back spasms, produced one of the great new-ball spells in a final — 3 for 16 in six overs, dismissing Rohit Sharma for a duck, Virat Kohli for 5, and Shikhar Dhawan for 21. Pakistan won by 180 runs. For one evening, the Lord's disgrace felt like another lifetime. He went on to finish as Pakistan's leading wicket-taker at the 2019 World Cup with 17 wickets, then retired the first time in December 2020, citing ill-treatment by the team management. He reversed that decision for the 2024 T20 World Cup, played his last international against Ireland, and retired for the second — and he says final — time in December 2024. Career totals: 36 Tests, 61 ODIs, 62 T20Is, 271 international wickets. He is now a British citizen through his wife Narjis Khan, which lets him play English domestic and franchise cricket as a local player — he turned out for Nottinghamshire in the 2026 T20 Blast and Trent Rockets in The Hundred 2026. He played the 2026 PSL for Rawalpindi, and from 2027 he'll count as an overseas player there. Off the field, he's a cricket analyst on Geo News shows. And yes — as that viral video reminded us last week, he still trains with Salman Butt in Pakistan. Sixteen years on, the two names are still linked.
Salman Butt never returned to international cricket. The 2026 training video is the freshest public evidence of where he is: still around the game in Pakistan, still in Amir's orbit. His precise current coaching or commentary roles aren't something I could verify to my standard this week, so I'll leave it there rather than guess.
Mohammad Asif is out of the game. He confessed, he apologised, and then he disappeared from public cricket life. No comeback, no commentary career of note, no rehabilitation arc. Of the three, his is the quietest ending — and maybe the one that says the most about how unforgiving this sport can be.
Mazhar Majeed served his 32 months and vanished from the headlines. The seven players he claimed to control were never all named. That loose end has bothered me for sixteen years.
Our analysis: the questions Lord's left behind
I've covered a lot of scandals in my years following this sport, and I keep coming back to three uncomfortable truths about this one.
First, the punishment worked as deterrence but failed as justice — or the other way around, depending on who you ask. Prison sentences for cricketers were unprecedented, and you can draw a straight line from Southwark Crown Court to the ICC's tougher anti-corruption regime. But the uneven fates of the three players — one rehabilitated into a national hero, two erased — suggest the system punished usefulness as much as guilt. If Amir had been a mediocre bowler, would the PCB have fought for him? I don't think so. And that thought should trouble anyone who believes in equal justice.
Second, the fixers were never really caught. Majeed went to prison, yes. But he talked about seven players and a two-and-a-half-year operation, about syndicates and million-pound Test fixes. The investigation convicted the men in front of the camera. The men behind the money were never in the dock. Every fixing scandal since — and this series will document several — has the same shape: players punished, networks untouched.
Third, we as fans share a small piece of this. I remember the mood in 2010: fury, yes, but also a strange eagerness to believe the tabloid had entrapped innocents, that it was all a setup. Rashid Latif said as much at the time. Some of that was denial, and denial is the fixer's best friend. The 2026 video of Amir overstepping in the nets got laughs and memes — but underneath the jokes was something real: we never fully processed what happened at Lord's. Maybe this series is my attempt to finally do that.
Fourth — and this one is for the history books — Lord's 2010 was Cronje 2000 with better evidence. I've always seen these two scandals as bookends. In 2000, Hansie Cronje — South Africa's beloved captain — was caught on Delhi police tapes dealing with bookies, and cricket swore it would clean house. A lifetime ban, a King Commission, tears at the press conference, and then the machinery of the sport moved on. Ten years later, at Lord's, the same machinery failed the same test, only this time the evidence wasn't grainy audio — it was a fixer on camera, cash on the table, and no-balls delivered to order on live TV. The punishments were harsher precisely because the embarrassment was greater. But here's my uncomfortable question: if the system couldn't stop it in the ten years after Cronje, with all the new units and codes, what makes us think the system stopped it in the sixteen years after Lord's? The next article in this series — the IPL 2013 case — will suggest an answer, and you won't like it.
The 2010 spot-fixing scandal didn't kill Pakistan cricket — the team won a Champions Trophy seven years later, with Amir himself leading the charge. But it killed something in the relationship between Pakistani fans and their team: the benefit of the doubt. Every strange no-ball, every sudden collapse since 2010 gets viewed through the Lord's lens. That suspicion is the scandal's longest-lasting damage, and no prison sentence can undo it.
Conclusion
Sixteen years after a tabloid's hidden camera filmed £150,000 changing hands in a London hotel room, the Lord's spot-fixing scandal remains cricket's most completely documented crime — and its most morally tangled one. Three players banned, three players jailed, one agent imprisoned, one team scarred. One of the three rebuilt his life in the spotlight; two disappeared from it. The fixers' networks were never fully exposed.
Next in our Cricket Mega Scandals series: the 2013 IPL spot-fixing scandal — Sreesanth's arrest, two franchises suspended, and the men who ran the league while it burned. That story is, in some ways, even darker than this one.
What do you think — did Amir deserve his second chance, or should all three have stayed banned forever? I genuinely want to know where you stand, because I've argued both sides with myself for sixteen years.
Frequently asked questions
What was the 2010 Pakistan spot-fixing scandal?
During the 4th Test between England and Pakistan at Lord's in August 2010, an undercover News of the World sting filmed agent Mazhar Majeed accepting £150,000 to arrange deliberate no-balls by Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif at pre-decided moments. Captain Salman Butt was implicated as the orchestrator. All three players received ICC bans and prison sentences.
How were the players caught?
Majeed predicted on hidden camera that Amir would bowl a no-ball on the first ball of the third over and Asif on the sixth ball of the tenth over. Both no-balls were bowled exactly as predicted on live television. A statistician estimated the odds of predicting them by chance at 1.5 million to one.
What punishments did Butt, Asif and Amir receive?
The ICC tribunal (February 2011) banned Butt for 10 years (5 suspended), Asif for 7 years (2 suspended) and Amir for 5 years. Southwark Crown Court (November 2011) sentenced Butt to 30 months in prison, Asif to 12 months, Amir to 6 months in a young offenders institution, and Majeed to 32 months.
Did Mohammad Amir play for Pakistan again?
Yes. Amir pleaded guilty early, the PCB backed his return, and the ICC amended its code in 2015 to allow early domestic comebacks. He returned to internationals in January 2016, starred in Pakistan's 2017 Champions Trophy final win over India (3/16), and retired from international cricket in December 2024. Butt and Asif never played for Pakistan again.
Sources
- News of the World investigation (August 28, 2010) and Mazhar Majeed video — via Wikipedia's documented summary of the sting
- ICC tribunal judgment, Doha (February 5, 2011): Butt 10 years (5 suspended), Asif 7 years (2 suspended), Amir 5 years
- Southwark Crown Court trial (October 5 – November 1, 2011); sentencing (November 3, 2011)
- The Daily Star fixing timeline; ESPNcricinfo "Cricket in a spot"; Express Tribune contemporaneous reporting
- Amir's 2024 retirement and 2026 domestic stints — cricketaddictor, hindustantimes, cricketwinner reports (2026)
- October 7, 2026 viral training video — circleofcricket.com/social_buzz/105975
Read more on Sixer Zone
- Pakistan's current T20I generation — the post-2010 era — lost the 3rd T20I to Sri Lanka: the team that grew up after Lord's, and where it stands now.
- India vs West Indies 4th T20I preview: tonight's series decider in Hyderabad — the kind of high-stakes game where every no-ball gets scrutinised.
- Shikhar Dhawan's legal action against tournament organisers: cricket's courtroom battles didn't end at Southwark.