Inside a British courtroom, Salman Butt and Mohammed Asif faced some harsh words from the prosecution. They were made out to be villains of the highest order, for they aren’t men who plotted against their enemies, but instead are men who allegedly acted against people they worked with and called friends, including the entire sport they represented.

Here is what the BBC’s Alexis Akwagyiram writes about the scene inside the courtroom:

The prosecution’s case contained references to a “depressing tale of rampant corruption at the heart of international cricket.”

The defendants were accused of behaving in a manner that represented “a betrayal by them of their own team, their own board of cricket and, most damaging of all, a betrayal of the sport of cricket itself – and all for greed.”

Ouch!

There is no doubting that the two Pakistani cricketers were caught in a very dirty and allegedly blatant illegal scandal. The world has seen the video and read the news report by the now-defunct tabloid News of the World – and the evidence is quite damning. But of course, a UK court and 12-member jury will be the ones to make the final judgment on their guilt or innocence.

Still, in the trial that began today at Southwark Crown Court over an alleged betting scam from August 2010 that involved the cricketers, a third teammate, 19-year-old fast bowler Mohammad Amir, and sports agent Mazhar Majeed, Butt and Asif maintain that they are not guilty to two charges of conspiracy: conspiracy to obtain and accept corrupt payments, and conspiracy to cheat at gambling. Both charges carry maximum sentences of seven years and two years in prison respectively.

If the men are found guilty, holding them accountable and humiliating them will probably not stop the “rampant corruption at the heart of international cricket” that Prosecutor Aftab Jafferjee, QC, talked about. Yes, the guilty must be held accountable and harsh penalties need to be handed down, but dissuading players from being tempted by easy money with jail sentences is only part of the solution.

Gambling in international cricket is big business. Hundreds of millions of dollars can be bet on single matches. And just like the game itself, the networks involved in the fraud-filled gambling are international too. Mumbai, Karachi, Dubai and London are connected via what Jafferjee called “influential but shadowy” bookies. They are unlikely to easily give up the obscene amounts of money they bring in. Here is a description of one Karachi-based bookie from a Newsline article by Ali K. Chisti:

He lives a playboy’s lifestyle, with a luxurious property and flashy cars. “We rent out different flats around the city since what we do is totally illegal,” says Shah. “I have dozens of people in a room on phones all the time. When people say they will pay up over the phone, it’s as good as a contract. It’s all about trust in our business.”

“The reason I’ve managed to do so well here in Pakistan is because people will bet on anything in cricket. Cricket is the perfect sport, much better than football, because there are so many aspects of a match you can give odds on,” he says.

Making an example of the Pakistani cricketers and Majeed will, in the big scheme of things, do very little to rid cricket of corruption. Sure, it’s a start. But everyone involved in this trial are small fish in a very large pond — and it’s a pond in which large inequalities and oversights remain.

In another Newsline article from earlier this year, Malik Arshed Gilani writes about the root cause of corruption in cricket:

The ICC should therefore, through the member cricket boards, convince the various governments of countries involved in the practice to legalise the betting industries. This, in the first case, would considerably reduce what the illegal bookmakers of India do today. As very large sums of money are involved, the criminal mafia controls these syndicates that are based entirely on untaxed black funds. With no winnings officially recorded, the possibility for crime is considerable.

Does the ICC have the resolve (and desire) to truly work with governments and law-enforcement agencies around the world to crack down on illegal gambling syndicates, or even reform the system when so much lucrative, untracked money is changing hands? Moreover, how do you stop corruption in countries where the government and police are just as corrupt as the people you are chasing?