For my part, I haven’t believed that cricket was 100% clean for several years. Not since the Cronje affair. But I could never see how anyone would fix an element of a game.

It always seemed too complicated, too risky, to fix the batting element. It is all very well to bet on a batsman getting a duck, and paying him to get a duck, but suppose some butterfingered clot drops the catch and it runs away for four?

On the other hand, as Miss Marple put it there’s always “…the need for greed, and the desire to be wicked.”

I don’t believe that there has not been some element of fixing at some time in any sport. It is as easy for a bowler in cricket to bowl a no ball as it is for a rugby player to miss a kick, and we know of betting on events in football matches already.

What really annoys me about all of this is that it is now a decade since Cronje and cricket administrators have spent the intervening time with their head in the sands over the whole issue. Did no-one tell them that bad things don’t go away just because you pretend they are not there? (I tried this with my overdraft for many years, but it didn’t work)

Unfortunately, the utter spinelessness of the Pakistan Cricket Board makes their players a prime target for those with no love for the game, but a lot of love for money. The criminals know – and some of the players have clearly worked out – that there is a good chance to make a lot of money without a player’s career being affected in any significant way at all. Not in a country where a lifetime ban lasts for roughly six months.

That the ICC are going to investigate the affair fills me with no confidence, either. The ICC would allow themselves to be sodomised by a rabid stray dog if they thought it would keep the Asian block vote happy. And having your governing body in thrall to the  parts of the world where the corruption is pre-eminent is never a good idea for any sport.

We all want cricket to be clean. But this sort of thing is going to happen again and again until the people running the sport grow some balls. Now would be a very good time for them to do so.

In the 1990s, the side were a force in County cricket, twice Championship winners and perennial contenders in the one day game. When T20 cricket came along in the 2000s, they won two of the first three competitions.

Since 2003, things have gone badly downhill in other ways. The membership has shrunk by, on some counts, 66%. The club has made a profit in only one of the intervening years, and began and then abandoned what turned out to be a disastrous policy of stuffing the side full of Kolpak players. Leicestershire now languish in Division Two of the County Championship and show no more sign of getting out than Chris Lewis does. Oh, and they’ve had no fewer than six chief executives in that time, too.

The common denominator in all of this has been chairman Neil Davidson. Whilst it is far too far a stretch to place the blame for all of the above at his door, recent events have turned him into the least loved man in Leicestershire – which is quite an achievement when you consider that Jonathan Agnew lives there.

First of all, Davidson oversaw the resignation last month of the latest chief executive, former Warwickshire batsman David Smith. No-one pretends that Smith was universally loved at Grace Road, but he was the man who brought about the end of the Kolpaks and the only profitable season of those mentioned above. More significantly, the reason for Smith’s resignation (and the whole thing is the subject of an ongoing legal action, so we have to be careful how we word this) is that Davidson was interfering in team selection – the specific incident apparently being whether offspinner Jigar Naik should be selected for a T20 match.

Even more oddly, Davidson doesn’t deny this, saying that it was his duty to represent the membership and try and halt a run of defeats. This belies the almost universal rule that chairmen don’t interfere in the day to day running of the team. Moreover, Davidson’s position would seem to be significantly weakened by the actions of a concerned membership, who raised the necessary signatures to call an Emergency General Meeting to hold a vote of no confidence in him.

What did Davidson do next? He refused to hold the meeting, claiming that the motion for it was legally invalid (a reason which this lawyer, for one, does not necessarily accept).

The tale then gets really strange, with head coach Tim Boon and captain Matthew Hoggard, along with other players, writing to the board, calling on Davidson to resign. Davidson, who clearly has read Toby Young’s ‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People’ , not only went running to the press, complaining that his staff were having the temerity to question him, but managed to upset the authors of the letter, who claim that it was supposed to be confidential.

And somewhere along the line, the Leicestershire players took advice from the PCA as to whether they could boycott – or at least stage a protest at – today’s game against Surrey.

In terms of management ineptitude, public relations (and employee relations) bungling and generalised avoidable stupidity, it makes the Pakistan Cricket Board look like rank amateurs. But isn’t it nice to know that there will be a story of cricketing chaos still running once the tourists go home?

Today they announced the squad for the upcoming one day games against England. Strangely, Mohammed Yousuf was in it. That’s Yousuf, a man who has always given the impression that he feels the same way about one day cricket as Shahid Afridi does about Tests – it is a nice idea in theory, but I’m not really the guy for it so why pick me?

More surprisingly, Shoaib Malik wasn’t in the squad. Malik and Yousuf famously have the sort of relationship that makes John Howard and Murali look like bosom buddies. Surprisingly few eyebrows were raised when Malik was left out of the last Test. Playing Yasir Hameed was a sound choice, but dropping Malik rather than Imran Farhat – a man who looks as much like a Test opener as my arse does like Natalie Portman – was odd. Retaining Yousuf for a one day series and not Malik surely reveals who the latest winner in Pakistani Political Selection Chairs is.

The strangest thing of all, though, is just how little comment this has generated in any of the media. It is not as if the day was absolutely bursting with sports news – Jrod was even on national radio talking about that Ricky Ponting story, a tale surely colder than an ice pack down the jockstrap.

Which must mean that the whole Pakistani infighting story is no longer too strange for fiction, it is now stranger than reality, too.

As I sat there, marvelling at how, without Jrod, the place seemed bigger, quieter and less full of expletives, some cricket went on far below us. Middlesex were playing Leicestershire and Matthew Hoggard (remember him?) was having a field day.

The last of his six wickets saw Shaun Udal tamely spoon a ball to point, where Paul Nixon caught it easily.

That’s Udal (aged 41 years 144 days) c Nixon (39 years 292 days) b Hoggard (33 years 221 days) 0

Without getting an actual corpse to stand at the crease, could you get an older dismissal than that one?

Ditto executions. Even in the olden days, when they held them in public, I doubt that I would have been one of those stood near the gallows or following the tumbril. It just isn’t my kind of thing.

In fact, the closest I have ever come to any of this was watching a film about the Dignitas suicide clinic in Switzerland, watching as a number of very ill people (one of whom, sadly, I knew) took their final journey.

But today we all got to watch as the Pakistani cricket team took it in turns to commit suicide, in public, in Birmingham.

Now, I know as well as anyone that Birmingham can have that effect upon people. Even so, trooping out one after the other to top yourself in front of literally tens of people really is a bit extreme.

At the moment that Salman Butt decided to bat first under an overcast sky, he made the clearest declaration of intent since the first caveman attempted to bludgeon himself to death with his own club. After all, he was there at Trent Bridge when Pakistan twice demonstrated their inability to bat in such conditions. What was he thinking of, if anything at all? Then there was the wafty, airy, drive that he played to get himself out…

At least the rest of the team went down with their captain. Imran Farhat and Azhar Ali perished in petrification, immobile and shotless in the fact of England’s attack and everyone else followed. No-one cheered.

The sounds of sobbing brought a startled flunky running. “Master! Master! Whatever is the matter?”

“Oh Salman,”, Butt wailed, “It’s all gone wrong”

“How, Master? How?”

“No-one finds us funny anymore. Salman”

“Surely not, Master”

“It’s true, Salman. We’ve tried it all – three captains who hated each other, suspending people and letting them come back right away, everything. We even gave Kamran Akmal wicketkeeping gloves!”

Salman is, by now, laughing so hard he can hardly breathe.

“But <gasp> Master, that’s <wheeze> hilarious <sob>!”

“No, Salman, it isn’t. Not any more. It was, but it is not now. No-one is laughing.”

“Might I make a humble suggestion, Master”

“Oh, go on. It can’t be worse than my idea of recalling Mohammed Yousuf”

“That’s just it, Master. Now we’ve recalled him, let’s arrange for him to only arrive the day before the Test. And then to claim that all of the flying has made him too tired to play”

“Go on.”

“And then we drop Kamran, and replace him with someone who has never taken a catch in international cricket”

“So, just like Kamran, but with the potential to be even worse?”

“Exactly, Master!”

“Salman, you’re a genius. Make it so!”

Now, a lot of players would, at this point, have gone off, spent every working minute in the gym, developed an addiction to lettuce and ended up with the kind of torso that makes a golf club look fat.

Not our Samit, though. Even allowing for the fact that I was looking at him on television (which apparently adds pounds, although I thought that was just to Charles Colville’s sunbed fund), he has clearly taken the opposite point of view. In fact, he seems to have agreed with the majority of the cricket-loving population of England that dropping a good player for being a few pies overweight is stupidly daft.

If anything, Samit seems to have gone completely the other way and actually put on weight. And good on him for doing so, for putting his own comfort and happiness ahead of some predetermined idea of what a cricketer looked like. After all, WG Grace, Warwick Armstrong, Mike Gatting, Arjuna Ranatunga and Inzamam may not have been lightning between the wickets, but they were no slouches with a bat either. And at least you knew that the formal buffet would always be eaten.

The thing about Random Rudi is that he always was, well, Random Rudi. You knew exactly what you were going to get with him – the odd decision so brilliant that you thought ‘How the hell did he get that right?’, balanced by the howler that made you think ‘How the hell did he get that wrong?’.

There is a myth that his decision making became increasingly flawed over the years. Yes, he was one of the umpires who cocked up the end of the 2007 World Cup Final, but he was one of four who got that wrong and, frankly, it was utterly hypocritical of the ICC to suspend any of them for a mistake in a tournament which they themselves had so comprehensively buggered in the first place.

Rudi was never a showy umpire like Bowden on Shepherd, but neither was  he a blend-into-the-background type. The closest he came to a trademark was his ’slow death’ finger of dismissal and even then it was no slower than Bucknor’s. In fact, when in recent times he grew a beard, there were many diehard fans who failed to recognise him at all.

Sometimes we expect too much from our umpires. We expect them to be infallible, when we allow the players to be less than that. In an age where umpiring is increasingly scrutinised by technology, it is arguable that Rudi did his reputation no favours by staying on for the last couple of years, allowing his reputation as a fine umpire who was respected by the players to be tarnished. On the other hand, it is to his credit that he didn’t go sooner and submitted himself to that kind of interrogation.

In truth, in the mythical match where you are having to bat for your life, you wouldn’t want to have Rudi at the other end. You’d want someone less likely to give you ought caught off your thigh. Or shoulder. Or teeth. If, on the other hand, you wanted to know that the guy at the far end was utterly unscrutable but quite likely to have a drink with you after the game, Rudi was your man. As we usher in an age where television is increasingly the arbiter and all an umpire needs to do is to count to six, we may never see umpires as good as we have now again. Which it is why it is a shame that any of them – even those you may not be greatly enamoured of – retire. You’ll miss Koertzen more than you think you will.

That was a few years ago. A fortnight ago, playing for a different side, I found myself at the crease with five wickets down, but a reasonable total on the board. The batsman at the other end, battling a hangover so bad that he didn’t dare eat tea, was soon bowled, bringing in a 17-year-old at number 8. Who I promptly ran out, going for a second run off a misfield. The number 9 – aged 16 – lasted two balls and number 10 went first ball. Four wickets for no runs added, only me and the number 11 left and still 7 overs to go. Three balls later the oppositions non-spinning offspinner chucked one up and I slog-swept it down the throat of deep mid-wicket.

To be blunt, I have no self-control on the cricket pitch. The ball is there to be hit, and so long as I hit it I don’t much care where it goes.

Does that remind you of anyone? The sort of person who might slog a quick thirty in a Test match when his side really need a couple of hours of dour defence? The sort of captain who is as likely to slog the ball to long off than nudge a quick single when getting off the mark?

In short, I don’t think that I am any less responsible than Shahid Afridi. So when do I get to captain England?