On the Couch / See no evil, hear only the uplifting

In our collective sporting consciousness (for "our," read sports fans world wide ) the most awful resonating memory is surely of the Chicago White Sox who "sold" the 1919 World Series, infamously becoming forevermore the "Black Sox."

Recently we've been battered again and again - in snooker (perhaps to be expected ), in soccer (ditto ), in cricket (surely not, we used to say ) and even in tennis (heaven forbid ) with reports of gamblers, entrepreneurs and other would-be miscreants trying to get their claws into our heroes, or otherwise trying to exploit fair sporting competition.

Since I didn't actually see her reports, I can't guarantee the veracity of the following, but the account doing the rounds on the Net seems eminently believable: Several years before the current war in Afghanistan, ABC's Barbara Walters did a story on gender roles in Kabul. Women, she noted, customarily walked five paces behind their husbands. Returning recently, the intrepid Ms. Walters observed that Afghan women, despite the overthrow of the Taliban, appeared content to preserve the old custom and still walked behind. How come women were prepared to retain a habit they'd once so desperately tried to change, was her question. One woman looked her in the eye and, without hesitation, answered, "Land Mines."

That's me in the burqa - hesitant about colliding with even a whiff of corruption in sport. On this account, most definitely no intrepid reporter: Carefully keeping my distance, I prefer not to believe that our passion can be so sullied and, certainly, not on such sordid grounds. Much, much better to spend time anguishing whether or not sport is scoring properly against developments that are politically and socially "off."

Take Arizona and its new state immigration law where happily, the proponents of America's national pastime have added their opposition to a legal maneuver that allows law enforcers to challenge any person on whether they hold the appropriate legal status or are illegal migrants.

Recognizing that the new law provides a real opening for abuse through ethnic or racial profiling and harassment, the Major League Baseball Players Association, after consulting with its members, has made public its firm opposition to the law. They've taken a stand, they say, because it could have "a negative impact" on international and home-grown baseballers alike.

It's pointed out that last season 27 percent of MLB players were Hispanic, and that the leagues include foreign players not only from Latin America but from all over the world, including Japan, Korea and Taiwan so that, in all, 28 percent of current MLB players were born outside the U.S. The association thus notes that hundreds of players and their families who move through the state during spring training or to play against the Arizona Diamondbacks could be targeted by the law.

An MLBPA statement said, "Players and their families could all be adversely affected, even though their presence in the U.S. is legal. Each must be ready to prove, at any time, his identity and legality in Arizona to any state or local official who is suspicious of their immigration status. This law also may affect players who are U.S. citizens but are suspected by law enforcement of being of foreign descent."

Writes Dave Zirin, a tenacious radical sports columnist, in his Web site "Edge of Sports," "This will be the last column I write about the Arizona Diamondbacks in the foreseeable future. For me, they do not exist. They will continue to not exist in my mind as long as the horribly named "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act" remains law in Arizona. It's a law that has brought echoes of apartheid to the state."

To back off from the dread feeling that another corruption scandal might blow up in our faces, a good tactic is always to be on the lookout for a new sporting fairy tale. Nowhere better to do so than in the glorious surroundings of the Caribbean, site of the current world Twenty20 cricket competition.

Yes, it can be seen as just another opportunity for cricket's elite Test-playing countries to garner a new trophy. But they were joined by two minnows, qualifiers from the dozens of smaller cricketing nations, who'd won the right to have a crack at the big time. Brought to our attention delightfully in a BBC blog by Oliver Bretton, we learned about the ultimate underdogs - "in sport as in any walk of life" - Afghanistan.

When Israeli cricketers first ventured abroad in the early 1970s an editorial in a Manchester paper lauded the "commitment to the game in a region more associated with violence and political mayhem," the cricket-loving editorial writer going on to wax that, "any country which knows about maiden overs and is able to calculate run-rate chases automatically deserves to rise up the civilized nation league table."

A bit over the top that, and cricket has since lost some of its innocence, but it was still most moving late on Wednesday (just after Spurs' Peter Crouch had sunk Man. City's money men's European ambitions ) to listen to the Caribbean steel band in Barbados forgo their customary pulsating beat to catch the delicate rhythms of the new Afghan national anthem. It was even more emotional than the playing of their opponents' anthem, the three-language South African national song that holds out hope yet for the future of Nelson Mandela's "Rainbow Nation."

The Afghans who have been mixing it up with the sport's superstars are all products of a very new tradition. Their love of cricket got its start in the bleak surroundings of the refugee camps in Pakistan that were created following the Soviet invasion in 1979. "From then," writes Bretton, "the journey to cricket's top table has been one of the most heartening stories in sport, and one of the most unlikely."

Nurtured in the cricket-friendly environs of Pakistan, when Afghan expatriates were finally able to return home their children took their love of the game back with them. Quietly, they continued to play even though the Taliban were largely unimpressed. Since their ousting, however, it has still largely been a case of self-motivation on a shoestring budget that has carried them on.

A couple of years ago, the Afghan national team was still languishing in the fifth tier of world cricket. Then, in 2008, they won a qualifying tournament in Jersey, another in Tanzania and moved up to challenge for elevation from division three in a tournament in Argentina.

By now they were being followed by a fledgling documentary filmmaker, Canadian Leslie Knott who recalls a key moment during that tournament in South America: "After an early defeat to Uganda, there were worries in the Afghan camp. They lost a key game and I came across fast bowler Hameed Hasan crying and sobbing. I asked him 'What's going on?'" she reports. "He said, 'Leslie, I have seen people killed, I have seen people shot and I never shed one tear. But this cricket hits me right in the heart and I can't control it.'"

Again they pulled through, qualified and stayed on course for the big time. In April 2009, the juggernaut was finally halted when the Afghans narrowly missed out in qualification for the 2011 World Cup that was played in the Indian subcontinent. Ten months on, that disappointment has been forgotten - victory over the UAE in Dubai last February put them through to the current World Twenty20.

Knott quotes Hasan: "After the troubles of the last few years, everybody is willing us to do well. We are hungry for trophies, and hope we can do better for our nation." She reports that one of the reserve players was killed in an American attack and most of the team have lost siblings, either to illness or war - "there's been a lot of suffering. But what they are doing now is making history. They have known each other since they were six or seven years old and are completely in tune with each other, which is why they are so close. They are like brothers. There's no rivalry between them, they really want to see each member perform well. They are doing everything they can to make Afghanistan proud of them."

Back home, facilities are still practically nonexistent and home international games are played in Sharjah. But the first proper ground is finally being built near Jalalabad along with a cricket academy funded by the U.S. embassy. There is also talk of a proper domestic competition. The under-19 team was in the World Cup, which is anther great success story, and there are a lot of girl cricketers, she notes.

Says Hasan: "Two or three years ago, nobody was interested in cricket too much. Now you see lots of children playing on the streets and in stray fields. Lots of people will try to play for Afghanistan."

When the documentary comes out later this year, I very much hope the BBC makes sure that the "Out of the Ashes" documentary is screened in this part of the world too.

There's a never-ending need for antidotes to those who would undo the positive that sport has to offer.