On Thursday night in India, we saw a snatch of video on TV: it was about a stylishly-lit room and a gleaming, polished table waiting for a banquet, but headed instead by three men in suits and Shahid Afridi.

This was a ‘leaked' video of the inquiry committee hearing on Pakistan's last tour of Australia. Afridi could be heard complaining about players not being focused, talking to people, signing autographs and ‘looking at girls'.  Now, Afridi himself has never been big on discipline and once was seen eating a cricket ball like fast bowlers do lozenges.

What was tawdry about video was watching fellow players being ratted on and the notion that it was this meeting that had arrived at the conclusion that the Pakistan cricketers, apart from being unfocussed, were also under suspicion for the m-word.

Match-fixing.

It is now more than 10 years that the Delhi police chanced upon Hansie Cronje talking in a phone-tap. What turned out to be a widespread sporting ‘crime' should have gone on to become the deed cricket should never have wanted mentioned around it ever again. Yet, it turns up every few months mentioned like if were one of those ICC code of conduct violations for ‘dissent' or ‘excessive appealing'.

Sometimes it is a half-serious whisper, at other times a conspiracy theory. When the IPL's dodgy-deal scandal was being revealed, the word match-fixing was tossed into the mix as if to prove that along with financial fraud, the cricketers were at least as dirty as the IPL's administrators.

A Pakistani friend calls this phenomenon Asia's ‘scar' from the bad days of 2000.

When, one after another great names, reputations and careers part of the sub-continent's cricketing heritage were found to have violated their sport, and traumatised its fans.

Whatever Shane Warne and Mark Waugh were being accused of, it hurt us most when Salim Malik, Mohammed Azharuddin, Wasim Akram, Kapil Dev, Waqar Younis, Inzamam ul Haq were named and shamed. Some were investigated, other banned or fined. Minor players - Manoj Prabhakar, Ajay Jadeja, Ata-ur-Rahman, Ajay Sharma, Akram Raza - faced their punishment too.

India has moved on since. Our neighbours, though, feel the painful reverberations of the "outing" of match-fixing even today.

It's happening again with the Sydney Test. Osman Samiuddin, editor of Cricinfo Pakistan, believes that his country's cricket is dominated by "the lack of a culture of reason and analysis".

Where defeats lead to rumours and rumours head purposefully towards the 24-hour news machine and Kamran Akmal drops catches because he's fixed a match, not because he's by and large a lousy ‘keeper.

Pakistan's team is both conflict and rivalry-ridden and Afridi only brought it all to life. It is why the inquiry into the Sydney Test is still "live", in the words of Lord Condon, the ICC's former anti-corruption chief.

What Condon's unit could not conclude was whether the "dysfunctionality in the dressing room" and "deliberate under-performance" was because captains had to be ousted or "whether it was something more serious... for a financial fix."

One is a grevious management crisis, which in theory can be tackled, the other a crime in sport. If we think cricketers switch freely between them, it is absolutely necessary to have proof.

Someone who is trying to scuttle his captain is a troublemaker, someone who is accepting bribes to alter his performance is a turncoat. One needs to be dropped, the other to be banned. There's a difference. Treating them like they are the same thing is an offence in itself.

Condon said, "At the moment it is a flurry of allegation, rather than any hard fact" and this is what is dogging Pakistan cricket today.

What makes it more dangerous, in Osman's view, is that talk of match-fixing is not just bazaar gossip given careless licence by the rent-a-quote former players. After a bad series, allegations of match-fixing fly quickly and uncaringly from the players and the administration.

It is as if there is no one, no respected stalwart, no young cricketer, to stand up and defend himself and his team. For just being at worst, a capricious cricket team, but not a crooked one. Condon won't fight for Pakistan. Pakistan itself must.