It’s difficult to make a quantitative assessment of the different, often polarising, views on Mohammad Amir’s return to international cricket last week. But in the lead-up to the first test between Pakistan and England at Lord’s, which marked Amir’s first five-day match since being banned for his involvement in a spot-fixing row six years ago, a raft of voices could be heard condemning, in some cases directly, the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) decision to allow him back into the fold.

“I am strongly of the view that one of the only ways we will ever expel this awful disease from our game,” said the England seamer Stuart Broad, “is to hand out lifetime bans for any kind of fixing.” Broad’s former teammate, the off-spinner Graeme Swann was even more scathing. “Mohammad Amir will walk out on the green and glorious turf at Lord’s on Thursday — and it will make me feel sick,” he wrote in his column for The Sun . “This is a man who crushed the morality of the game. And yet he is being allowed back to play at the Home of Cricket. Amir should have been banned for life for his part in the corruption scandal of 2010. No matter how good you are, if you sell your soul for 30 pieces of silver, you have to pay the consequences.” The former England batsman Kevin Pietersen also waded into the debate. “Any sportsman or woman caught match-fixing, spot-fixing or taking drugs should be banned for life,” Pietersen wrote in The Daily Telegraph . “They have broken the rules, should pay the price and not be given a second chance… People always deserve a second chance in life but sport is different.”

How, you might wonder, is cricket, or indeed sport in this case, different from life?

Consider, first, where Amir comes from. “The first time I met Mohammad Amir was when he was 16 years old, coming to an under-19s camp,” the former Pakistan coach Geoff Lawson wrote, when the spot-fixing scandal broke in 2010. “He comes from a small village near the Swat Valley and was delayed by three hours because the Taliban had closed the highway.”

At the time when he overstepped at agreed stages of a match, purportedly in exchange for a sum of money, Amir was still only 18. But in the very same innings that he made these no-balls, Amir’s bowling was also thrillingly awesome to watch. He picked up six English wickets, and it was plainly evident that he cared immensely about the game, when on picking his fifth scalp he slumped to the ground to kiss the turf at Lord’s. This was a sport that he played because he loved, but in the eyes of some, it was also a sport that he had now disgraced beyond redemption. Yet, even then, even to the harshest observers, it ought to have been clear that Amir had been misled. His transgressions, if anything, weren’t as much a case of misplaced avarice as they were a product of cunning inducement; in Amir’s case, among others, by his own captain Salman Butt, a figure that he looked up to.

For these lapses, which, it’s important to bear in mind, had no bearing on the actual result of the contest, Amir has been heavily punished. Not only was he served with a five-year ban from all cricket-related activity, but he was also found guilty by an English court of an offence of conspiracy to cheat at gambling, for which he spent six months at the Feltham Young Offenders Institution. As Jonathan Liew recently wrote in The Daily Telegraph , Feltham happens to be “one of Britain’s most notorious juvenile prisons… afflicted by drug use, racism, gang warfare, endemic bullying and what a 2013 government report described as “unacceptably high levels of violence.””

At the core of any reasonable modern-day justice system is the principle of proportionality. It posits that the punishment for any wrong should be in proportion to the severity of the act or the omission involved; the process of making this judgement, of determining what is proportional, also further partakes factors that take into account the age, the social and the economic background of the offender. In Amir’s case, it can be quite plausibly argued that his crimes were scarcely befitting of a five-year ban, let alone a life ban, especially when one considers the fact that both Butt, who was 25 at the time of the incident, and Mohammad Asif, then 28, were ultimately accorded the same punishment.

Cricket, therefore, isn’t doing Amir any favours by allowing him to return to the sport. Contrary to what Pietersen has argued, cricket, or indeed any sport, isn’t all that different from life. If anything, the purpose of sport ought to be to lift us, to move us, to enliven us, and to do better than what ordinary societies might. To allow Amir to return to international cricket, however, isn’t tantamount to any of that. It’s merely the decent thing to do.

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