Among all the questions raised by the Pakistan Sting of the Week, one continues to bug me. What bookmaker would take a bet on a no-ball being bowled on the first ball of the 15th over? What type of bookmaker would accept a wager on a certain amount of runs being scored in the 23rd over of a one-day match?

A very stupid one, for a start. If you were a bookie and a punter came to you wanting to place a bet on something so specific and meaningless, then surely his request would betray a prior knowledge. You wouldn’t want to take him on, would you, especially if the team in question is made up of Pakistani cricketers?

Spot-betting, aside from being a game for people with too much time on their hands, is a bizarre offshoot from what we might call more honourable versions of the punt. In horse racing, the sport with the most established betting history, there are no bets on who will lead at the 800-metre mark, or who will take the rails run at the top of the straight. Even the most exotic racing bets – such as the now-banned practice of bookies taking bets mid-race - are based on where the animals finish.

By contrast, spot-betting hinges on interim results, such as how many runs an individual batsman makes, how many sundries are conceded, or, as in rugby league for instance, who is the first points scorer. The potential for corruption is multiplied, not simply because of the greater number of opportunities for fixing, but because the temptation for players is of a different ethical nature. Paradoxically, the temptation to spot-fix relies on players having a moral code they will not breach.

The late Hansie Cronje, the disgraced South African cricket captain, was caught not fixing matches but spot-fixing individual scores. Cronje would never have fixed a result. In his flexible, customised moral code, to fix a result would be to betray his country and his teammates and to compromise his deep desire to win. But to lean on a young player to get out for less than 15 runs was, to Cronje, doable at the right price. It wasn’t actual match-fixing. It was a very lucrative way of tooling about with something inconsequential. He clearly felt that he wasn’t fixing a match. Likewise, Mohammad Aamir and Mohammad Asif, the alleged no-ball culprits at Lord’s, may well have justified their actions by asking whether it really mattered. You can bet that whoever talked them into doing it (if they did what they seem to have done) convinced them that a fool and his money are easily parted, and all they were doing was swindling some idiotic bookie at negligible cost to their team.

And so when it comes to the ICC’s reinvestigation of the Sydney Test last summer, it might want to consider a middle-road explanation. Previously, it had inquired into whether the Pakistani players conspired to throw the Test match, and found that they did not. Did they throw the match or not? Perhaps that is the wrong question.

What about this for an explanation? Kamran Akmal did not conspire to lose the match, but he might have been on the end of a pay-off if he did not take a catch after the 30th over of the Australian second innings. Mohammad Yousuf, the captain, might, for instance, have been offered money to arrange for no wickets to fall to catches in the first session of the fourth day, when he put his fieldsmen on the boundary. Asif, who bowled lamely that day, might have been on an earner specifically to not dismiss Peter Siddle.

It’s now clear that spot-betting can be so arcane that the loss of the Test match might have just been an unintended consequence of some spot-fixing that players thought was insignificant but, in the end, was not. It’s also possible that some Pakistan players, so demoralised by the existence of spot-fixing within the team, were not up to the mental challenge of defeating a resilient Australian XI. At that level of sport, a five percent loss of concentration can be the difference between an easy win and a humiliating loss. My point is that Pakistan players may well be guilty of spot-fixing, but not guilty of match-fixing.

All this is speculative. I agree with those who say that any culprits should, if found guilty, be banned for life. I also agree with those, like Geoff Lawson, who say there are underlying causes of corruption in Pakistan cricket which, if not addressed, will continue to foster dishonest play. And also, as Lawson learnt during his two years as Pakistan’s coach, that some of those underlying causes are tragic, personal and unique to that country.

But in the meantime, something very obvious has been overlooked. If bookmakers are stupid enough to take spot bets that are fixed, and players are corruptible, then the result will be that the bookmakers will be stung often enough to refuse taking such bets. If the Pakistan players are corrupt all or most of the time, the market would have become a sham and would have ceased to exist. The fact that the market does exist tells us one thing: most of the time, the players are trying their hardest. When they are not, they are choosing their moments selectively. Otherwise there would be no bookies left to fool.

It’s a meagre ray of light, but at times like this we’re desperate.