At 50, Wasim Akram’s brand has pushed forth his public rehabilitation

The former Pakistan captain stands fully rehabilitated without ever acknowledging or shedding light on suspicions of corruption during his career, writes Osman Samiuddin.

Every man is allowed his rehabilitation, but it can only come after the acceptance of transgressions in the first place. Wasim Akram has not spoken about the issue of corruption that dogged Pakistan cShow more

On Friday last week Wasim Akram turned fifty and perhaps to mark the occasion, he is now available to us as a fragrance.

No really, he is: over the weekend, “414 – the Scent of Sultan” was launched in Pakistan.

It is eco-friendly, in so much as it honours his feats in the endangered long-form – the “414” is the number of Test wickets he took and it comes designed as a red ball.

It is yet another thing that is not bowling that Akram will now be known for, another bulge in the brand that he now is, a brand that is benign and smiles and shines and that has evened out the serration of his real life and times.

It is now 13 years and three months since he bowled his last ball in international cricket, to Yuvraj Singh in the 2003 World Cup game at Centurion.

A couple of months later, having been axed as part of a subsequent revamp, he let the world know he was retiring.

In the formless and wretched world of Pakistani retirements, Akram’s farewell fit in, protracted beyond the necessary, forewarned for a couple of years and yes, a little sullied.

In those 13 years he has built a career from the simple expedience of being. Commentary came first but is not something he does as much as dabbles in, although remember that awkward time when he tried to become a newscaster for ESPN Star Sports?

He is no Michael Atherton or Nasser Hussain and, unlike even, say, Ravi Shastri, he has been unable to transmit a personality on to the screen.

That is not unexpected because despite being such a public figure, there has always felt a core to Akram that is unknown and guarded from all but his closest.

It is deep inside him, at a guess, near where resides the awkward, unsure and naive boy who first emerged in 1984.

He has dabbled in coaching, a bit of work here, a bit there. It could be said he was unfortunate as a cricketer to miss Twenty20, but he has probably profited more now from these leagues, as a coach/guru able to work to his own convenience.

Elsewhere, there is a charity foundation, a roving ambassadorial portfolio as a high-profile sufferer of diabetes and earlier this year, he launched an app.

A TV chat show is supposed to be in the works, he appears in multiple ad campaigns and, to much acclaim, was once a celebrity showstopper at a fashion show.

If it feels a little directionless, then, one, it is not the same directionless of us mortals. And two, on closer inspection, it has actually served a grander purpose, even if we cannot know whether it has come by design, chance, or a combination of both.

What this brand has done, you see, is to all but disappear the nastier smell of Akram – and the fragrance is useful – as one of the lead characters in the match-fixing drama of the late 1990s and early 2000s involving the Pakistan national team, and in Justice Qayyum’s subsequent investigation.

Those investigations, let us remind ourselves, censured Akram. They could not find him guilty of specific allegations, though one of them only because a key witness perjured himself.

Akram was given the benefit of doubt because such an inquiry warranted, in the eyes of Justice Qayyum, evidence to prove guilt beyond any shadow of doubt and not simply reasonable doubt.

He was also given it, as Justice Qayyum and other officials later acknowledged, because of his services as the great player he had been.

According to the lead prosecutor, Ali Sibtain Fazli, the inquiry was always meant to be the starting point of a deeper investigation into the period. Had that happened, possibly with formal police assistance, who knows where that might have gone?

Maybe, in neither finding Akram guilty nor absolving him of the allegations, the inquiry actually left open so much room for interpretation that the room ceased to matter altogether.

Nobody asks him about it now and in the context of his life and career, it is as good as not having happened at all.

Akram maintained his innocence at the time and has even said that the allegations spurred him and his side on in some instances – days after he was kind of punished, Akram took 11 wickets in a Test in the Caribbean.

But it happened and to pretend it did not is as good as to condone it. At worst, he was complicit in the corruption. At best, he was not directly involved but, as captain and key player, knew what was going on around him and chose not to do anything about it. In between there is no escape.

Every man is allowed his rehabilitation, in life no doubt but also, it should be encouraged, in sport. But it can only come after the acceptance of transgressions in the first place.

Akram stands fully rehabilitated – in 2009, he was even inducted into the International Cricket Council’s Hall of Fame – without ever acknowledging or shedding light on what happened.

Instead, on his 50th birthday his brand is so powerful that unlike Mohammed Azharuddin, he does not even need a fictionalised biopic to whitewash bits of his past.

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