London: Mohammad Aamer is the youngest bowler to have taken 50 Test wickets. He is also the youngest to have been banned from all cricket for five years and to have pleaded guilty to corruption in a court of law.

It is a double tragedy for the youth and his sport. And the stigma will remain: Mohammad Aamer fixed. And maybe the cricket world should not feel compassionate but, rather, that the ban and the sentence — six months in a young offenders' institution — are right. Aamer pleaded guilty only to the deliberate no-balls at Lord's, but the court was told of his direct contact with an illegal bookmaker in Pakistan about doing a spot-fix in the Oval Test; and of a plea he made to the bookmaker to delete his text messages. There was also the strange case of the Asia Cup. Aamer was spotted by television, when waiting to bat in Dambulla, holding his batting glove to his ear. The ICC said there was no evidence Aamer was talking on a mobile outside his helmet, but a former Pakistan Test player was told by one of Aamer's teammates the mobile was inside his helmet.

Nevertheless, as a cricketer, Aamer will be, and is, being missed. So few are the quality bowlers worldwide, that he must have been contesting the number one spot now with Dale Steyn, James Anderson and Graeme Swann. Last summer against Australia at Headingley, Aamer gave a brilliant exhibition of conventional left-arm swing. He took seven wickets for only 106 runs; he gave his flooded and war-torn country hope.

Against England at the Oval he gave a brilliant exhibition of reverse-swing.

Nadir and zenith

One moment England were 194 for four, the next 222 all out, as Aamer (five for 52) had a magic spell worthy of his mentor Wasim Akram. Another victory, further hope. He was even more magical in the next Test, the fateful Test, at Lord's.

It was to be his final game for a long while, aside from a club game in Surrey when Aamer breached his ban unwittingly. And it saw both his nadir and zenith. As he himself has admitted, Aamer bowled the two no-balls to order at Lord's and was guilty of spot-fixing.

Yet he also found time to run in from the Pavilion End and rip through England even more incisively than against Australia. Aamer took four wickets for no run, and not just any four wickets; Alastair Cook, Kevin Pietersen, Paul Collingwood and Eoin Morgan. Of left-arm pace bowlers, only Sir Garfield Sobers, Alan Davidson, Akram and Zaheer Khan have bowled such a spell in Test cricket. Such is the rate at which international cricket moves, it is not certain Aamer will return to the Pakistan team when his ICC ban expires in 2015, although he will be 23 officially. Until 2015 Aamer will have to bat and bowl in the nets. Only then will the world's most gifted young all-rounder be able to carry on where he left off.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2011