“Regret casual attitude and ‘silly mistake’ that led to my ban,” says Shakib Al Hasan

Shakib was banned for two years, with one year suspended for not reporting a corrupt approach.

Shakib slammed 606 runs in 2019 World cupFormer Bangladesh captain Shakib Al Hasan has expressed deep regret and sorrow for his ”silly mistake” of not reporting a corrupt approach to the officials, which led to him being suspended from cricket for a year.

Shakib was banned for two years, one year of it suspended, for failing to report corrupt approaches during an IPL edition by an alleged Indian bookie named Deepak Aggarwal.

"I took approaches too casually when I met the anti-corruption guy and told them and they knew everything. Gave them all the evidence and they knew everything that happened. To be honest, that's the only reason I was banned for a year, otherwise, I'd have been banned for five or 10 years," Shakib told Harsha Bhogle on 'Cricbuzz in Conversation'.

The all-rounder was in the form of his life during the ICC 2019 World Cup, scoring 606 runs.

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"But I think that was a silly mistake I made. Because with my experience and the number of international matches I've played and the amount of ICC's anti-corruption code of conduct classes I took, I shouldn't have made that decision, to be honest,” the 33-year-old said.

Lesson learnt, Shakib's advice to all young cricketers is to never take any such message lightly.

"I regret that. No one should take such messages or calls (from bookies) lightly or leave it away. We must inform the ICC ACSU guy to be on the safe side and that's the lesson I learnt, and I think I learnt a big lesson," he added.

Shakib admitted that he had become arrogant and never felt he was doing anything wrong by not reporting the bookie's approach immediately.

"Because you do most things right in your life, you tend to get arrogant with some decisions. You may not realize but you're doing wrong by the books. It never came to my mind that I am doing something wrong. It was just a feeling of 'okay, what's going to happen, leave it' and I continued with my life. But that's the mistake I made. And that happens," Shakib said.

(PTI inputs)

 
 

By Jatin Sharma - 24 Jun, 2020

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