In some countries, like England and Australia, cricket is played as recreation; in others, like India, as meditation. Watching Pakistani cricketers, however, one senses the sport is their purest physical expression. They are like Argentine footballers: unpredictable, a little shady, a bit dangerous, full of eccentrics and cranks, often inefficient and blundering, but possessed of a mercurial passion and an utter magic. When the legendary cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan led Pakistan to an improbable World Cup win in 1992, it wasn't just a triumph of skill, it was a celebration of cricket itself -- a game, its followers like to say, of "glorious uncertainties." Then, as now, in the lanes of Karachi and Lahore, in track pants and tees with duct tape wrapped around a tennis ball, or on parched Punjab dustlands, barefoot in salwar kameezes with homemade bats and bricks for stumps, youngsters are to be found tearing in to bowl, in a performance always.

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So when the brilliant light of Pakistan cricket dims, the rest of the cricket world takes notice. And these days, Pakistan is confronting some of its dimmest times, in cricket as in everything else.

In November 2008, following the Mumbai attack launched by Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, India broke cricket ties with Pakistan, causing the game there a significant financial blow. A few months later, in March 2009, a terrorist group attacked a visiting Sri Lankan team. This attack, undertaken in clear morning light, as the team bus drove to the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, injured several of the players and killed six security men and the bus driver. Pakistan has not been able to host international cricket on home soil ever since. Then, in 2010, the national team was rocked by a match-fixing scandal: Three leading players, including the captain, were suspended as a result of a sting operation conducted by the British tabloid News of the World (the players are currently in Doha at a special cricket corruption court for hearings that are expected to conclude on Jan. 11), and a widening investigation has placed several other players under suspicion. Three years, three body blows to Pakistani cricket. It now stands on the brink of collapse.

Each of these events has deep roots. The modern concept of sport as big business came late to cricket. Not until India's economy was opened up in the mid-1990s, attracting multinational companies trying to reach a mammoth audience through advertising spots, could international cricket dream of signing television or player contracts worth even a fraction of those in, say, soccer or baseball. The coming of big money led to the thoughtless overscheduling of tournaments and, in an underregulated atmosphere, an explosion of interest from underworld betting cartels.

These factors combusted into cricket's first match-fixing crisis in 2000, tarring big names across the world but especially in India, Pakistan, and South Africa. One may argue that India is scarcely a less corrupt nation than its neighbor -- the founder-commissioner of the big-bucks Indian Premier League, in fact, is under investigation on a wide range of corruption charges -- but at least it has been able to reward its elite cricketers spectacularly.

At 170 million, Pakistan's population is the second-largest among cricketing nations, but its middle class is too minute to draw corporate money. Its cricket administration, structured to serve under a crony chairman appointed by the nation's president and invested with virtually unlimited power, is utterly dysfunctional. Pakistan's cricketers, with increasingly little opportunity to play and governed by this fickle administration, are by international cricket standards glaringly underpaid.

A friend in Pakistan speaks of teenagers on the streets placing bets on outcomes of every delivery -- the pitch, in baseball terms -- of local cricket games. The phenomenon, when rigged, is known as "spot fixing." For a hustling youngster like Mohammad Amir, the stunningly gifted 18-year-old at the center of Pakistani cricket's current fixing scandal, for whom gambling is the daily stuff of the street (in a land where the president is nicknamed "Mr. Ten Percent") temptation is an easy trap. All he would have to do to improve his income is perform the seemingly innocuous act of overstepping the bowling crease -- a "no-ball," cricket's equivalent of a foot fault -- at a pre-decided moment.

As the scandal unfolds, it appears that Amir is only a pawn in the game. He was allegedly roped into the scam by his captain, Salman Butt; and Salman Butt through his agent, a British businessman by the name of Mazhar Majeed. Majeed, in turn, colluded with gambling cartels, and everyone, if reports are right, raked in the money.

In early November, two months after News of the World broke the story, the case took a sinister turn. Another young cricketer, Zulqarnain Haider, disappeared from Dubai, where Pakistan was in the middle of a series against South Africa, and surfaced at London's Heathrow Airport, seeking asylum. He'd received death threats, he claimed, for refusing to throw a match. He had ignored the threats, helped win the match for Pakistan, and then, fearing for his family's life and his own, fled. Details haven't been forthcoming: who exactly issued the threat, why Haider flew to England rather than to his family in Pakistan, why he did not report the threat to the administrators in the first place. What is clear is the kind of control gambling cartels can take of a sport once they have access.

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